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A Recap of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text

Hello Potterheads! This week I tried out the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast, which is hosted by Vanessa Zoltan and Casper ter Kuile. The purpose of the podcast is to reexamine the Harry Potter series as a sacred text as opposed to entertainment. They go in chronological order and each episode is based on a single chapter of the series, which they look at through a certain theme. The idea was thought up when one of the cohosts reread Harry Potter while taking a divination class and felt more connected to it over the Bible. The first episode was focused on chapter one of The Sorcerer’s Stone and examines it through the theme of commitment. The podcast began with an intro that I definitely appreciated. Casper is heard reading aloud the first chapter of The Sorcerer’s Stone before his voice fades out as serene instrumental music is played, and finally, the hosts introduce themselves. After a short story about commitment- the chapter’s theme- each host attempts to sum
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A Final Look At WEPO

Yesterday concluded the final round of group presentations in my WEPO class for our final project, and I really enjoyed seeing how every group conducted their own composing process. For our final project we had to work in groups and contact different local organizations so that we could create three different texts for them. My group, for instance, decided that we wanted to work with a nonprofit organization. We worked with Young Life Tallahassee, which is an organization that teaches children about the gospel of Christianity. For our composing process, we had to create three texts to inform high school students about an event Young Life was hosting, called Signing Day. This is the day that those interested in their summer camps would sign up to attend them. Last Wednesday and this Monday, we were able to see how each group created their texts for their organization and how effective those texts were. Overall, I believe that I learned a lot from my classmates. All of the teams ope
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The Theory of Composing

   If there is one thing that I have learned from my WEPO class, it’s that definitions are not set in stone. When I began this semester, I believed that I had a concrete idea of what various terms that are used in the English world meant. Genre, writing, and editing were just some of the key words that I had heard over and over while taking English classes in secondary school. These terms were drilled into my head since elementary school, so of course I would know what they mean. I believed that college would just expand upon these previous definitions, but this class alone has changed my opinion on what certain words mean.    In my initial blog post, I stated that composing was less detailed and planned out when compared to writing. I stated that a composition could be compared to puzzle pieces and a writing would be the complete puzzle. I now believe the opposite. I believe that writing is not as formal. Writing could be writing a to-do list, a journal entry, or a simple message to
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Remediating and Reflecting, A Look at Project 2

                Project 2 for my WEPO class required that I find an assemblage and then remediate it into something new. An assemblage is something that is composed of parts of something else, and can be anything from a painting to a poem. For my project, I decided that I would take a song and turn it into something else, but what song and what new form would I use for this new creation? Ultimately, I decided that I would use not one, but multiple songs sung by Beyoncé for my project. I would then take those songs, analyze them, and use them to give advice to others in the form of a listicle. Here is a link to my final product: faithsiplin.atavist.com/ 5-life-lessons-from-beyonce.                 A common theme on my blog has been writing and composing. I often use my puzzle piece analogy to define these two terms. Composing is a skeletal framework, or puzzle pieces, while writing is more thought out and is the full picture that the puzzle portrays. This project utilizes both of
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My Takeaways from a Talk with Jody Shipka

                On Thursday, I had the opportunity to sit in on a talk by Jody Shipka. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, since this was my first guest lecture that I had attended in college, but I was not disappointed by the experience at all.                 Whenever I read an article or essay for a class I always feel some type of detachment from the author when I am reading their work. I can never really picture the person that devoted their time to an essay as a typical human being like the rest of us. For some reason, I tend to put authors on a higher level than the rest of us. This lecture by Shipka shattered my preconceived notions about authors completely. I realized that the people that author these articles and essays that we read in various courses are just average people that decide to write an article, and make sure that their goal is accomplished. Now that I have actually met someone that has published a well-recognized article in the English community, I can a
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Assemblage: From Amy to Florence to Beyoncé

The basis of today’s blog post will be the difference between bare repetition and ethical assemblages. Arola and Arola define bare repetition as performing something the same way that your ancestors did, or in other words, copying someone else without changing their work to create something different. Creative repetition is what they would consider an ethical assemblage; this is when someone takes something that someone else has already done and transforms it into their own version of this original idea. To stick with the recent theme of music and remediation, we will be comparing three different versions of the same song, “Back to Black” by Amy Winehouse. Here is a link to the video for Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJAfLE39ZZ8 Here is a link to Florence and the Machine’s cover of “Back to Black” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqe35aouiOc Here is a link to Beyoncé and Andre 3000’s version of “Back to Black” https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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Remixing and the Music Industry

For project two, I believe that I will be turning a song into a story and creating a book. Since I have decided to choose this as the subject of my project, I believe that my audience would be music lovers. Even though I am turning a song into a story, I think most of the people that would be interested in this book would be the people that are familiar with the audience and the people that follow that artist. However, this remediation would also introduce a new audience, those that do not know the song but read the book, to the artist and song as well. Remixing is extremely common for my primary audience, which would be those that love music and people in the music industry. Often when you people think of remixing that think of a song that has been remixed or music in general. In fact, according to the Everything is a Remix video, remixing originated in the music industry. Since remixing is common in the music industry and common to the audience that I will be targeting my rem
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