Style Collaborative Presentation Reflection:

For this collaborative presentation, my group was given the task of creating a Prezi discussing one of the five rhetorical canons. My group, comprised of myself, Olivia, and Jen, chose to center our presentation around the style rhetorical canon. We were curious about how other students across our college campus defined style when it comes to writing. To answer this question we started our presentation with a brief introductory video that included some interviews of students attending Moravian College telling us their definition of style in terms of writing, with background music from Taylor Swift’s “Style” to fit the mood. Afterwards, we offered our own input on what we learned overall from our research on style. As I mentioned in previous posts, style centers around the idea of how words are depicted in terms of text, whether on paper or digital. We also made sure to include how the definition of style is varies over time. Style was often referred to the layout and format of a writing piece, but now that digital writing has surfaced, style has evolved to considering how font, color, and style can impact the importance of a message.

Next we get into our actual presentation. First we discuss the definition of style in rhetorical writing and include key points from outside sources. Next we have a slide with advantages of style in traditional and digital forms. We did a compare and contrast with transitional and digital writing forms. It was a group effort finding appropriate information to fit in both of these slides, but they definitely include great information and highlight key points of style. Next, we include examples of how style can be seen in different forms of writing. Our examples include a comic strip, a comparison between two book covers and two movie posters, in which we wanted to have a class discussion on how style is seen in these examples and if one conveys a better message than the other. We also include how style in writing has changed by including an example of a letter from Alexander Hamilton and compare it to the writing style of a modern tweet. This conveys how the style of writing has changed over time and how modern technology can limit the amount of characters included in a digital text.

Overall, my group collaborated very well with this presentation. We were able to meet numerous times and continued to edit and offer additional input on certain slides. We agreed on a lot of the content to define and compare certain definitions of style. We also tried to challenge ourselves with finding really good examples of how style is not only involved in writing, but media platforms and advertisements. Finding people that were willing to be interviewed for the video was a struggle, but we were able to find people willing to do so and were surprised by their various, but on point, opinions of what style meant to them in terms of writing. We did our very best with this presentation, and I personally feel that this presentation offers valuable information on style in terms of writing and how it can be applied to outside digital or hand written platforms.