Repurposing to Remediation
Our largest project for this class involved taking a piece of old writing and first repurposing it for a new audience, and later reworking the repurposed piece for a different medium. For my original source, I chose a paper I wrote for a sociology class I took freshman year detailing the life accomplishments of my grandfather, my mother and myself and how various factors such as socioeconomic status, gender, and time period shaped the achievement of our goals. I chose this paper because I remember having fun interviewing my family members and connecting their comments to a broader sociological context. I thought what they had to say was interesting and I wanted to make their stories accessible to a new audience.
My final remediation project probably looks nothing like my original source material. My main challenges for the overall project were narrowing my topic, identifying my exigence, and finding my audience. My original source was very broad and including many components. I talked about the lives of three different people from childhood to adulthood, and thus there were numerous subtopics within the topic. What did I want to focus on and what would be my new purpose for the work? At first I came up with very general purposes. I wanted to preserve my family history. I wanted to tell people about my family because they had an interesting story. I wanted to connect my family’s life to history in general to encourage people not to let history repeat itself (i.e. for the components of my family member’s lives that did not go as well). Having such vague ideas of purpose made identifying the audience difficult. Who even cared about my family? Should I share the piece in a magazine or as a podcast?
I struggled a lot with my repurposing project, but ultimately I was able to narrow down my topic. In my original source I briefly touched on the issue of student debt. This was something my grandpa did not face but instead my mother and myself had to worry about. I therefore decided to write a piece explaining the phenomenon of student debt, with my grandpa’s life story as the backdrop. I showed how his accomplishments were more easily achievable because he did not have to spend his life worrying about how to pay back student loans. My repurposing project was a sort of creative non-fiction piece modeled after the Peter Hessler's New Yorker piece, "Tales of the Trash." The audience was the general public, or anyone who read the New Yorker. I stylized the piece as if it were an article from the New Yorker website.
I found the transition from repurposing to remediation much simpler. At first I again toyed with the idea of making a podcast where I would essentially recreate my New Yorker piece in sound bites, with my own voice narrating the facts and my grandpa’s voice explaining the events of his life. However, while browsing through sample ePortfolios from past semester I came across a medium I liked even better: a brochure. Jamie Goddard, a past Writing Minor student, had written her repurposing piece on why people choose to attend college. For her remediation project, she created a brochure that explained various post-high school options to students such as taking a gap year. I thought this medium would be perfect for my own project. I could create a brochure for prospective college students explaining to them why they should care about student debt and how they could avoid this problem. Since my audience changed slightly, so did the details I included, and thus I cut out my grandpa’s life story almost completely. Therefore, my remediation project looks nothing like my original source material. The topic is more narrow, the exigence is different, the audience is different, and even the lens is different (i.e. I don’t use my family members’ life experiences as a lens to explain larger sociological phenomena).
Despite my struggles and the drastic changes I made from start to finish, I am proud of the work I did. I have never taken a piece of writing and recreated it in a new form before, and thus this project made me think creatively in a new way. I hope you enjoy the finished products!