Creative synthesis refection PDF

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Creative Synthesis For this project, I decided to make a collage of pieces of cosmopolitan magazine covers that have the words he, him, or his in an article heading. I have always read cosmopolitan magazines and their new articles that they have on snapchat, but I never thought about how sexist cosmopolitan really is until we read “Heteronormativity in Cosmo” in class. This reading and my interest in cosmopolitan magazines is what inspired me to do this project. My project shows the heteronormativity as described in the reading “Heteronormativity in Cosmo” by showing how Cosmopolitan magazines are geared towards women who are in relationships or are attracted to men. I showed this by the use of pieces of Cosmopolitan magazine covers that say things about men and how men effect the lives of women. Cosmopolitan magazines are all about sex, relationships, weight loss, fashion, and other things. These topics do not seem that bad until you see how they approach them. The majority of people who read cosmopolitan are women and Their magazine is geared mainly towards women and on almost every cover there is something that says, “he wants this” or “how to make him happy” and other stuff like that. By saying these things on their articles, they are assuming that everyone reading their magazines is attracted to men or are in a relationship with a man which is an example of the heteronormativity that we discussed in class and through our readings. When looking for cosmopolitan articles and covers that showed sexism and heteronormativity I came across one that said “If men edited Cosmo. You’ll laugh your butt off!!”. This was on the cover of one of the cosmopolitan magazines and is saying that only women read cosmopolitan and that only women can edit and write for cosmopolitan which shows sexism. It also shows gender stereotypes about men and women by saying men cannot read cosmopolitan it is only for women. In the reading “Heteronormativity in Cosmo” the author talked about how cosmopolitan magazines show more straight couples and talk about straight couples more than gay or trans couples. This project supports that argument by showing multiple article covers that are geared towards women about their relationships with men. There are many themes we discussed in class that this project shows such as gender stereotypes, sexism, LGBTQ rights, and media and stereotypes. I chose to represent these themes in the form of a collage of cosmopolitan articles because I felt like it was the best way to convey the evidence of all of the themes within cosmopolitan magazines. A collage was also the best creative option for me because I am not a very artistic person. This semester I feel like I have grown in my writing in many ways. Before this course I was not very good at really anything with writing. I was not good at analyzing things doing citations. My first couple of projects really showed how I struggled in those areas, especially the citation part. In the first couple paper my citations were not correct, but now I feel like I have a good understanding on how to do citations. For our last paper, the perspectives analysis, I really enjoyed having the outline that was provided to us for our fifty percent draft worksheet and I feel like it helped me set up the paper with quotes and actually come into conversation with the quotes. In previous papers, I also struggled with coming into conversation with my quotes, having them actually make sense in my paper, and not just randomly throwing in a quote to meet the work count. If I had used an outline like the one for the perspectives analysis I think that my papers would have flowed better and the quotes that I used would have made more sense and supported my paper in better ways. Analyzing different forms of text was something I struggles with before this course and I know that there is still more that I can improve on, but I do not think at the beginning of the year I could have written the long paper of the perspectives analysis that I did at the end of the year. If there was one thing I could change about this course it would

be the manner in which the material we are responsible for is conveyed, ie due dates for everything given at the beginning of the year instead of week by week. Overall, I think I can say that my writing skills have greatly improved this year and I will take these new skills and apply them to future classes and paper I will have to write....