25/08, 26/08 Part #2: 26/08 - Team Work and Presentations

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This class was a culmination of a week's worth of work. We were asked to split into teams and present a poster on any academic text, paying special attention to the elements of academic writing that we learned in the past few classes. I was in a team with four of my classmates - Abhay Krishnan, Dolaram Surya, Keerthi Vardhan Reddy and Likhitha Kavuru. The poster we came up with was a reflection of the time and work we put into it.  

We started by trying to find an article we could use for our poster. We looked up countless academic texts on the internet, but most of them were too complex and long-winded for us to use. We finally fixed on a research essay from the IMPACT journal - The Devastating Kerala Flood - 2018 And Its Impact On Market Trends In Consumer Durables In Kottayam by Rani M. Susan. We chose this essay because it used simple language and had a clear demarcation of elements. The next issue we faced was setting up a meeting at everyone's convenience. Two of my teammates were day scholars, meaning they could not stay on campus for too long after class. We hence had to take a page from the pandemic handbook and do a meet online. We discussed the contents and layout for the chart in the meeting and decided on everything we needed to buy and do. I wrote out the content we needed to list on our poster. This made it easier for us to get to work on the actual poster because we already had a solid plan. We decided to make the poster by breaking down its academic writing elements and using those to map out how the essay drives itself forward with that framework. The note-making exercise also allowed us to make changes to our initial assumptions regarding the essay. We had originally thought the essay was argumentative in nature, but on further reading, we realised that the thesis statement in that particular essay was a hypothesis made on limited initial knowledge and was ultimately proven wrong with research. This led us to change the text genre of our poster from 'argumentative essay' to 'research essay'. The process of understanding the text itself was made easier by the fact that we knew the author personally and could contact her in case of subject-related queries. 

We finally got together to make the poster on the 26th after our morning class. We decided to go for a scrapbook style with our poster because it would be easier to write bullet points on smaller sheets of paper. This also made it more convenient to make a poster and also lent itself well to the aesthetic. We also printed out actual blurbs and graphical evidence from the article to make our poster more informative and interesting. Likhitha's artistic eye added to the visual attraction of our poster. We presented this chart to a panel of research scholars; including Nikhil Sir and Sonali Ma'am. We first presented our chart, emphasising the academic writing elements and how they tie in with the content of the essay. Nine other teams also presented their posters. Then we moved to a display-oriented arrangement where the panel could come assess our posters. We were asked to explain the thought process that went into making the poster and we also received very valuable feedback. It was also a very good development exercise where we worked together as a team to accomplish a goal. 

This week's class was all about putting classroom knowledge to practical use. We observed, analysed and organised essays on our own which aided us in understanding exactly how the concepts we learned to come into play in an essay. The presentation also built camaraderie among the team members; it was a good personality development exercise that made us all push boundaries and think out of the box. More importantly, we all thoroughly enjoyed the entire process of making and presenting the poster and I personally felt very proud of the end results with both the worksheets and the poster. This week was, by far, my personal favourite in Academic Writing. 

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