Wp3 Revised Fdraft

Chaidez 1 Dianna Chaidez Masha Fedorova Writing 2 19 March 2019 Watch Out For Strangers I decided to turn one of my favorite old fairy tales’ as a child into a play. This story has a very important lesson that teacher should not expect their kindergarteners to learn. I wanted this play to target college students, who frequently read on their free time. The story not only has an interesting plot, but a valuable lesson everyone has to learn at one point in their life. One of the main reasons I chose to translate the fairy tale into a play was because of the life lesson hidden in the text. Furthermore, this is why I have chosen a mature audience because they will analyze the text and learn the lesson behind the fiction. As a college student it is easy to want to trust everyone because they figure everyone is on the same boat, meaning students believe their peers want to help them because they are all struggling. However, there are people on college campuses or near college campuses who want to cause harm, so I want to stress that college students should not be too trustworthy of everyone. The primary audience of the fairy tale is young children because parents and teachers want kids to learn not to trust just anyone they come into contact with. This audience is far different from the one I chose. The initial age range for the fairy tale is probably from 4 to 10 years of age, while the play I decided to write ranges from 17 to 22 years of age. It is evident the two groups have a different capacity for intelligence and understanding, so it is more likely that the older age group will comprehend the meaning behind the story. The fairy tale stresses that children should ignore anyone whom they do not know because they think their grandmother will be eaten if they do otherwise. While, the play highlights the valuable lesson that not

Chaidez 2 everyone will have the best intentions for you just because you do for them. College student should always be cautious when meeting someone new and defer from sharing too much personal information with them. As we grow up, we stop listening to fairy tales and don’t read much into the lessons because we categorize them for children. I knew doing my translation as a play would be effective because students find the genre as mature and interesting enough to analyze the lessons within them. Plays are something young adults feel is meant for their age and appreciate the writing. The fairy tale differs from the play because the dialogue in the play makes the purpose of the story more interesting and easier to analyze. Having a story told to you is for small children but having to follow along with dialogue and stage direction is for young adults. I believe the lesson within the story is far more valuable and relevant to college students than to a young child. As we grow older it becomes harder for us to trust people because we watch the news and hear stories about people ending up dead or raped. As a child you do not truly understand how harmful and disgusting the latter is, until you grow up. As a young adult, you start to grasp the severity of situations and empathize for others. As a child you just refer to those situations as something “bad” and “scary” not “tragic” and “repulsive”. I feel that this genre translation effectively communicates the intended audience. It was not too hard to integrate information from the primary text into the new genre. I was able to easily integrate information from my primary text into the new genre. I was able to keep the dialogue of the fairy tale as dialogue and any scene changes or important feelings were put into stage direction. The fairy tale had very little dialogue, so I was forced to create more. By adding more dialogue, I was able to fully imitate the new genre. This created a more mature style to the text, so young adults would find the new genre attractive and interesting. I was able to keep the dialogue the same but was forced to use a higher vocabulary than the original piece in order to target the new audience. I needed to leave out and add to the

Chaidez 3 new translation in order for it to work. In my play I added a glossary, which is something suited for young adults not children. I added dialogue that is not mentioned in children’s book because it destroys the intended audience for young children. I also added scenes that were not meant for young children in order to make the play entertaining for young adults. Moreover, this actually makes the play unsuitable for young children. This translation required me to leave out and add many parts of the play, so the new translation could make sense. I had to leave out thoughts that the character had in order for the writing to fit into the play’s formatting. By adding what the characters were feeling I would have them speaking to themselves for most of the play, so it was better for me to just put minimal thoughts in the stage direction. This required me to add those emotions to stage direction to maintain the same plot. I was also forced to add a glossary at the end of the play to fully imitate the genre. In writings young adults read, they always have a glossary because they use higher vocabulary in the texts. The new genre changed the words and phrasing of some of the original text; however, it was necessary for me to change it in order to establish my new genre. The new genre lead to some challenges I had to overcome. The challenges of my genre translation were deciding when to cut to the next act and when to create more dialogue since primary source had very little. The hardest part of the genre translation was dividing the fairy tale’s plot into 5 acts like most plays I’ve read. I was not sure whether I was cutting too early or late into the acts, so this led to an uneven distribution of dialogue. Moreover, I was trying to separate the acts by change in location because it seemed to flow best this way. The second hardest challenge was adding more dialogue because there was not enough of it to complete the 5 acts in my play. This is the part where I got creative and changed their thoughts and emotions it events and dialogue. I was able to overcome both these

Chaidez 4 obstacles by focusing on what worked best with the plot and writing in dialogue that felt right. I have learned that a change in the genre can change a lot from the primary text. I learned that by changing a genre of any writing can easily alter the purpose, intended audience, and maturity of any writing. It is important to write clearly and directly to your intended audience. By using the correct vocabulary, you can achieve the latter. Writing about something relevant to people’s lives make the new genre translation not only more important but relatable. It is okay to take stuff out of the original text in order to make the new genre more suitable for the new audience. It is actually very smart for an author to change their word choice and language of a text, so the new genre becomes fully developed and more entertainable for the new audience. The concerns I had to keep in mind was whether I was using proper vocabulary to seek out my intended audience and what is the proper way to convey the purpose of the original story in a more relevant way. I borrowed a skill that I read in Kerry Dirk’s, “Navigation Genres” article about knowing that different age ranges are “limited to types of books” (Dirk). He reveals it is important to know what genres an age group is more likely to read because then you can learn from those genres on how to implement similar vocabulary that is intended for your sought out audience. Another skill that was useful to me came from Peter Elbows, “Teaching Thinking by Teaching Writing” article. He said, “by writing down our thoughts we can put them aside and come back to them with renewed critical energy and a fresh point of view” (Elbows 38). The first draft of my play I felt that the idea of not talking to strangers was not stressed enough, so I referred to this specific quote and decided to leave the play alone for three days. When I read it on the fourth day, it was amazing how new ideas started to flow out of my hand and I realized that I could add the actual words of “I will never talk to a stranger ever again” from the man character and it fit so perfectly into my plot.

Chaidez 5 These two articles helped me overcome some hard challenges and made me think outside of the box when writing the new genre translation. Without having read theses article I would have been lost as to what genre actually is. Dirk and Elbows both use examples and language that helped me better understand genre and how I could successfully write about it. I have learned that by reading other people work writing about the same genre actually helps you write your own paper. Both these authors gave amazing tips, but I think the best tip is that every writer has their own way of writing and it is okay for you to refer from changing your work because of other people’s criticism.

Chaidez 6 Works Cited Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” 3 Mar. 2019. Elbows, Peter. “Teaching Thinking by Teaching Writing.” 3 Mar. 2019.