The Bluestocking Influence

Note from the Editors

At first glance, our four social justice issues seem to stand in stark contrast to one another: what exactly do women’s health, the Trump administration, child welfare, and teen pregnancy have in common? You could give the best stab at drawing parallels, attempt to search between the lines in order to ascertain greater continuity, but at the core of it, all four topics attempt to achieve the same simple goals: to speak up about present injustice, educate our readers about why they should care, and to advocate against apathy, misinformation, and mistreatment of minority groups.

We all felt very strongly about the pieces that we decided to put in our magazine project. Because we all put our persuasion effect projects into this magazine, we felt as if we were able to have a call to action for the public concerning each of our social justice issues, rather than having someone passively reading each of our pieces and doing nothing in return. Each member of our group feels strongly about our social justice issues and because of this we picked our best pieces with relative ease and we’re excited to have you read them.

While picking the pieces we thought would be best to include, picking pieces that didn’t fit well within the magazine came as well. We felt some of our pieces lacked enthusiasm, had information that was no longer relevant, and didn’t have that “eye-catching” effect. Tangi initially started with a slideshow of pictures that had different states and statistics on them about child welfare, then Brooke showed her a site about making interactive maps. She decided to scrap that project altogether and start fresh with this new layout.

Adapting and translating papers proved to be a fun task for some of our group members, for others it proved to be time-consuming and gave new meaning to “creative freedom.” Some of us combined a few of our projects to make a completely new project, notebook entries were also added to some pieces, and different modes of writing were used as well. As a group, we were able to collaborate and find a new way to project our ideas, whether it was through interactive maps, slideshows, writing styles, or pictures. For example, Hailey chose to change her information effect project from an essay medium to a power point with a voice over. She felt that this would first, be a better way to present the information without turning the project into a thinly veiled argument, and second, to better differentiate between her information effect project and her persuasion effect project.

Each of us discovered new things as we embarked on this writing journey. We found that while the writing process for each genre is generally similar, the impact of each piece varied on the audience and the message. This project also taught us that while having a text based medium can prove to be effective a large amount of the time, other mediums proved to be more effective overall for specific pieces. We also had to do extensive research to find the most reliable information.

Making revision choices as a group turned out to be the most difficult part for some. We all had great ideas, but getting them to come together for a uniform vision was challenging. Hearing new perspectives from our group members on the work that we had been working on all semester proved to be extremely helpful for the revision process, whether it was in clarifying an overall message of a piece, or to increase the impact.

Different writing genres are present throughout our magazine and that is what made the project so fun. We were able to explore different ways of getting our central ideas across to our audience in functional ways. Through the use of persuasion, providing information, re-living someone’s memoir, and a few others, we were able to make this magazine come to life.

We would like to tell other groups that would like to pursue a similar project to meet often and listen to others ideas openly. By doing so from the beginning, you will be able to collaborate easier and have a better-finished product. It’s also extremely important to set ground rules, such as schedule and turnaround timeframes for different components, and really outline who will be responsible for what portion. And finally, it’s important to make sure to set a specific mode of reliable communication so that you can keep everyone within the group on the same page.

Because we are all busy college students and are taking this English course online, it was hard to find times to come together and meet. This does not mean, however, that our final project fell short. We were able to communicate promptly through email and we all stayed in touch with one another as best as possible. Overall I think our site has strong visual and informational context, and we are proud that we came together despite our differing schedules and support one another throughout this project. This effort helped to create a final product that we are all proud of.  

In terms of the design of our magazine, we think it is done well. Together, we created something that is visually appealing.  We agreed the design aesthetic should be modern and minimal, with a layout more conducive to that of a blog over an online newspaper due to the differing media used to accentuate our points. Our site accomplishes this. Formatting and placement were well thought out and intentional. For example, we used icons where necessary to keep the site cohesive and clean in appearance, as our social justice issues differ from each other enough that adding a ton of photographic images would have felt busy and disconnected.

We believe that our magazine is thought provoking, unique, and empowering; and we hope you feel the same way. Our main objective was to inform the public on minority groups and the maltreatment thereof and we accomplished that.