Aiyanna Nicholson
Professor Matias
ENGL 21003
1 May 2022
Collaborative Research Project Essay
With this group project, I had a lot of doubts at first on how everything was going to play out. The first decision that had to be made as a group was the topic that we were going to base our children’s book on. The way that we got started on making this decision was by each sharing different ideas on what topics we had in mind and a good amount of my classmates had ideas that centered on food or more specifically eating disorders so we all voted and came to a consensus on using eating disorders as a topic. In acknowledgement of there being several types of eating disorders, we narrowed down our options to anorexia seeing as it is one of the most common forms of eating disorders. When it came to the research side of things, it was fairly easy on my part and I think that my other group members would agree because we were all are able to find articles and sources that had an abundant amount of information on anorexia which we were then able to use it in our book when describing certain symptoms surrounding the disorder. Once we had a couple of articles saved that we all agreed on, we jumped into dividing up our work which was easier than I thought it was going to be since everyone was assigned two pages except for Anthony who was in charge of the illustrations. For the title, the name of our character and overall storyline, we all just threw ideas onto a google doc and picked which ones we thought fit the best. Overall, establishing a topic, dividing up the work and finding the articles was the first phase of our project.
Our next step worked towards figuring out who the audience of our childrens book would be. At first we thought that we would make this book for younger kids where there would only be a handful of words on each page but that didn’t really make sense considering the topic of the book was eating disorders, so we finally settled on it being geared towards kids in elementary school or more specifically, children around 10-11 years old. I was thinking that this age group would be perfect because after researching our topic, I found out that the age group of those who suffer from eating disorders the most is individuals who are 12 years of age and older. With this in mind, creating a book for those that are most vulnerable and at risk to developing an eating disorder, could bring more awareness to the topic and even serves as some type of representation for those that have one so they could feel less alone and even see that there is a possibility of recovery since our book ends with the main character trying to heal and adopt healthier habits. Keeping the age in mind, my group had to be careful with how we worded some things in our book and just the overall type of language that we used. As I was writing my two pages, I found myself straying away from writing at a elementary grade level and one my group members Aleisha commented on that fact while providing suggestions of ways that I could “dumb it down”. An example of where I made this mistake is how in one part I wrote “ From snapping at my parents to feeling angry one minute and feeling dejected the next.” In this part, taking into account the audience, dejected wasn’t the best word choice so I replaced it with the word sad. Another example of this same thing happening is when I wrote “ will I always avoid the foods that I love just so I can be perceived as someone who is beautiful even though my body continually appears to be so distorted in the mirror.” Although this sentence is particularly intricate, I changed it so it would appeal more to 10-11 year olds. Moving onto the images, our goal was to do a picture per page and the pictures simply had to align with what was already written on each page. An example of this is how the very first page, talks about how some people have strong minds that don’t make them hate their bodies and the picture that went along with this was of a character that had a lot of muscles and next to this character was a drawing of a brain that was filled with thoughts such as “ love yourself ” and “ keep going”.
As for our contributions in the project, I think that everyone contributed fairly and did the part that they were assigned on time. All things considered, I think that this project went better than I expected because the thing that I was worried about the most was how we were going to create a book that was coherent and seemed put together especially since we are all online and had to communicate virtually. A good idea that someone in my group had was to create a google doc where we would construct the first draft for our book before transferring it into a much more aesthetically pleasing template. Since we knew that we had to have at least 10 pages we had to organize who would write the first two pages and who would write the second two and so on. After establishing what order we would each write in, it was simply a matter of building onto what the previous person wrote. To elaborate, after the first two pages were written, it was my job to write the third and fourth pages. The way that I went about doing this was by reading what the first two pages said and then finding a way to write something that contributed to it and just lead to a logical storyline. Although this method proved to be a pro when writing our book it was also a bother at some points where it felt like the ending of the story was being rushed but this was quickly solved after communicating with each other on what we felt could be improved. On the topic of communication, it is another big pro that came with this project and by that I mean, it was easy getting everybody to reply and meet up over zoom to discuss the different aspects of it. An example of this was how during the break, we knew that we needed to have at least 5 pages done and were able to easily get it done along with the matching illustrations within a day or two because everyone responded efficiently. After we had all of our pages written down, we needed to review everything and through suggestions from each other as well as direct comments that were made on the document, we were able to form a finished product. In all, I think that heading into this project I had low expectations on how smoothly everything was going to go but am very satisfied with the end result of our work.
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