Story

For this project, I wanted to have a little fun and recreate a story that I am sure everyone in class has heard. The classic fable that I chose was The Little Red Hen. I put it into a university setting and instead of farm animals making bread, it became students making a presentation for class. Even though I made it a communications project, any university student could relate it to any general group project.

Being an amateur to social media overall, I wanted to explore a platform that I am not entirely familiar with. This platform is Twitter. I thought it would have been easy to snap a couple of pictures and then write the captions, given the context of the pictures if I had chosen Instagram or Facebook. The thread that I created on Twitter allowed the iterations to feel like different pages of the story.

As far as language goes, I chose to stay in tune with the original story. I wanted people reading it to draw similarities from the fable without outright naming the characters. I think it adds charm, because in a university setting, students do not talk to each other like the way the characters in the story do. Keeping this tone of voice also creates a feeling of nostalgia and brings people back to the time in which they first heard this fable.

For what I wanted to do, sticking to the word limit of 100 to 200 words was difficult. To get the feeling of the story, a lot of repetition of lines were used such as, “But Student B said, ‘Not I,’ and Student C said, ‘Not I,’ and Student D said ‘Not, I.’ ‘Well, then,’ said Student A, ‘I will.’.” If this was not done, I think that is would have been less clear that I was pulling inspiration directly from the story.

There could be several actions that the new version of The Little Red Hen could incite. The first would be reflection. It might make students remember a time in which they either felt like Student A or made them realize that they had been acting like Students B, C, and D. Even though we are adults and should have learned this kind of responsibility when we first heard the story, it is a good reminder to help one another in order to reach certain goal, whether it be to create a presentation or to make bread. The last tweet also literally spells out a call to action- “Don’t be Students B, C or D! In any context, help one another to reach goal that everyone deserves credit for.”

The specific audience that I was trying to reach was college students. These are people that use Twitter often and that would remember hearing the story of The Little Red Hen. The students would all have a specific memory of how working together on a project does not always run smoothly and I think that this retelling would resonate with them.