How does this assignment consider different perspectives, especially culturally unfamiliar perspectives?
The original Panchatantra was taught to the princes as a teaching of different morals, perspectives and values and why people came to these conclusions. The prompt is to write about how fate and destiny is portrayed and taught, this is a take that can be argued from many different perspectives even in today's age, this specific story (of Somilaka) shows a perspective where destiny and action are 2 personified forces that act upon people.
Did the use of AI tools help you in your second draft? How or how not?
I believe the use of AI as feedback did help me in the second draft as I was able to clump more of my ideas together more tidily and fixed many grammar mistakes I missed. However I also think that if I could redo this, I would've asked for more time so I could plan out what I was going to write better after looking at the feedback.
Prompt for the assignment.
Rewritten draft after the Fun with AI critiques and changes.
Some improvements I could make on this assignment is making more blurbs (back of the book summary), as I only had 2 ideas and they are very similar, but It would be best to try out multiple structures and try them on a mockup for the back of the book. Then ask for feedback from people outside my group to really understand which ones would be better. However, at the time of making it, it was pretty late and I could only ask Zoe about which blurb she preferred.
Another improvement I could make is creating more types of promotion posters, like banners, or summaries, or even just different sizes. Then do the same strategy as mentioned before of asking people outside my group about their feedback.
One of my assigned parts was to write the back of the book blurb, so I tested a few ideas out, I analyzed a lot of different children's picture book blurbs. Eventually I settled on having a general introduction of the characters, then leaving a cliffhanger with a question. I created 2 drafts for it and asked Zoe which one she liked more and what I could've changed. After receiving her feedback, I rewrote a few parts and submitted it.
I did the same with the poster, asking for feedback specifically on the colors as the mockup looked unfitting, then I adjusted some text around and shapes to fit cleanly and the following week, I showed both the blurb and the poster to my teacher, who also gave me solid advice on the writing which I used to improve it.
This assignment built on previous English classes' works because in junior high school's English classes, I had to critically analyze tropes and themes in detective fiction novels we were assigned (as at the time, we were learning about detective fiction and planning on writing our own at the end of the year). We do a similar thing in this assignment where we are meant to analyze the children's picture books we wrote about and find common aspects, afterwards, we have to develop our own thesis and support it all on our own, which means like my prior English classes where it was very challenging and you had to be creative to get a good score, it was similar in this regard but we were given even more creative freedom since unlike the junior high english class where we had to specifically identify tropes, themes and implications, in this assignment, we could make our thesis practically anything as long as its related and has areas to argue.
I believe using AI tools to get feedback for our essay's originality, arguability, depth, and clarity of thesis were helpful as it could identify the areas of change and tell us if we're on the right track so the rewrite would be better. For example, one advice I used to improve my second draft was I needed to include vocabulary that matched the depth of my essay, so on the second draft I did exactly that and improved some of the weaker or unclear points in my essay while rewriting certain paragraphs. It's very useful for getting specific ways to improve the writing (like it said which paragraph and topic my argument was weaker on) rather than just "it could use more clarity", which is great for my learning long term as I can identify examples better.