**(You can read the revision of my synthesis paper in the post below. Hope you enjoy!)
Astounded.. That is how I would describe my feeling of being told to transform a 2,000 word synthesis paper on how the advancements of technology effect education to a mere 500 word blog post. How can one fit such a broad and intricate topic into such a short amount of space?
Source: Netanimations
When asking myself that question, I decided that it would be important to focus in on the broad points of my original paper and then try to touch on each one throughout the blog. So in my paper, I broke the different sections down into…
- Background/My view on how technology affects education
- Conflicting views from other sources (More advanced technology is bad for society
- Supporting views from other sources (More advanced technology is good for society)
- Examples of technology affecting education/learning in a positive way + My views
- Conclusion
This simple breakdown of general ideas allowed me to pick and choose what I thought was really important throughout the paper and put it into my blog post. By doing this, I made sure that my point was still being conveyed even though I was limited to about a quarter of the amount of words. With that limit I felt like I was really squishing my paper down.
Source: Reddit
I could have narrowed my topic into something much more specific, but I felt like if I did that, I wouldn’t be giving the reader the full context of what I was trying to explain. So I tried to keep almost all of the points from my original paper in my synthesis and take out some of the unimportant stuff. For example, I gave a much less extensive background of the topic and instead linked some helpful articles throughout my blog so that the reader could dive into the topic more if they didn’t know much about it. I also tried to cut out a lot of the text concerning the conflicting views because I didn’t think I would need those specific opinions when trying to express my point. Rather, I just gave a sentence or two saying that there were people opposed to the view that education was a big help to education in society. Another big issue that I came across when trying to convert my original essay was the tone of the paper as a whole. Obviously the word choice and style of an academic piece of writing is supposed to be a lot more formal than that of a blog post, so when rewriting my ideas into the post I had to be consciousness not to use extremely proper wording and make the writing sound more like a conversation.
I felt like the transformation of the paper into the blog post was especially difficult because you are expected to convey the same message and convince the reader of your point, but you have to do it in a less serious tone. It definitely took me a couple tries to do!
Source: MakeAGIF
It seems hard from my perspective to be able to convince someone about a serious topic in less than 800 words. Also, given that blogs generally are used for pretty spontaneous writing, it felt difficult to incorporate all my sources and still have enough room for commentary about the topic.