A Creative Experience

I believe that there is a significant difference between creative writing and our research paper, which is more in line with persuasive writing. Creative writing provides entertainment value for the reader, and in some cases have a “moral of the story”, although this hidden meaning is not intrinsic to the nature of creative writing. In Persuasive writing, however, the purpose of the writing is bluntly to change the opinion of the reader about a certain topic or issue. Persuasive writing usually accomplishes this, or attempts to accomplish this, by stating the new opinion or idea as a thesis then supporting the thesis in the body of the writing. Clearly, the more support and higher quality of sources presents a stronger case than writings without these. Altogether, the thesis and the support combine to make an argument, which is essentially what persuasive writing is. There is a significant difference between drafting a research paper and a creative assignment, as the processes utilized to begin them are very different for each one. The research paper is started either by stating a thesis and gathering evidence, or by gathering evidence from which you write a thesis statement. Creative writing is much more ambiguous, as different writers have different strategies. For the most part, the creative process begins with some sort of brainstorming session to invent and edit new ideas. This is the process in which our group underwent while writing for the digital story project. I believe that our task in the brainstorming process was more difficult than the other groups’ because we were the initial group, so we had no foundation upon which we could expand. We had to start a creative story that could be expanded upon by other groups, and that was our only direction. I believe that the wide-openness of the project was actually prohibitive as we spent most of the time brainstorming as opposed to actually writing and editing the story. There was also pressure to write a story that was at least somewhat interesting for our peers. However, I believe that our story turned out well.

I personally have not had much experience with the digital medium, as I have never either written or followed a blog. I do read some articles online, that mostly consists of sports and news topics. The digital storytelling project was my first experience writing and publishing something online. As such, I was new to the whole Google sites interface, and I had to ask around to learn how to be able to do certain things. I never really explored the interface beyond the necessary aspects for the group project, as I was uncomfortable with the most basic functions. I think that this will not be my last experience, however, as the usage of the digital medium is ever expanding. I believe that there are many reasons for this, but the most significance is convenience. Almost everyone has a computer and Internet access, so online writings can be much more easily accessed than a physical copy. Also, these digital copies usually copy significantly less than their physical counterparts.