Final Project

For my project, I chopped up a five-paragraph essay that I wrote about five-paragraph essays into puzzle pieces. I then chopped up another copy of it into individual words. The process was actually very cathartic, because I hated that essay. I then had participants play with both sets and tell me about their experience with them. The puzzle was generally labeled as “too easy” or “boring.” Participants had much more fun with the words because they could manipulate them to whatever they wanted to say. They could make sentences, poems, or just blurbs of thought.There was much more creativity and flexibility.

The purpose of this experiment was to demonstrate how formulaic writing can only ever take one shape (like the puzzle) and is rather easy and boring to write and read. However, with the freedom of individual words comes more fun, creativity, and fluidity of thought. Freedom is power when it comes to writing.

Below is a photo of my completed project.