Latter-Day Issues

Note from the Editor

This semester, Spencer and I (Robbie) have had the opportunity to learn and write about issues surrounding the LGBTQ community and the LDS Church. To be more specific, Spencer has been writing on the church policy change from this past November, and I have been writing about what LDS church members and leaders can do to make a positive difference to these current issues at hand. While our topics are slightly different, we both share a common goal in teaching others about how these issues have created alarmingly high numbers of suicide, depression, and homelessness for LGBTQ youth here in Utah, as well as any other LGBTQ Mormon youth.

When selecting the papers I wanted to use for my revisions, my first thought was “which two papers are thus far my best work?” It would be easier to improve lesser quality, but to improve what was already my best efforts would actually push me to be a better writer. I also wanted all of my work to be educational for its intended audience, so felt it would be best to take the two that provided the best educational experience as they were and use those for revisions. Lastly, I wanted to use the two that already had the strongest call to action. Luckily, my report as well as my proposal happened to fit all three criteria mentioned here, so those were selected as my revisions.

Spencers criteria was for the most part the same as mine. He’s had the same goal of educating others on the topic, so wanted to pick two essays that really helped others understand why this is a problem, and what needs to be done. He also wanted to revise essays that encouraged people to do something to help fix this problem. Spencer’s report and his position argument were the ones that most strongly fit this criteria, so he also decided to use those as his two revision pieces. We also both felt that these two essays that each of us selected made more sense together, and had a better flow together than any either of our other work, so it just made more sense to keep them in their original format, and just revise and polish what we already had.

After discussing certain circumstances with our instructor, our group and instructor agreed upon a slightly different approach for our translation portion of our magazine.

For me, I decided I wanted to translate/ adapt my memoir. Of all my papers this semester, my memoir had my favorite moral attached to it, yet was also the most poorly written paper of the semester. All semester I basically wanted to throw that essay away, and recreate the same message in a different way, and here was my chance. So, I created an evaluation on Mormon culture, teaching the same message, but in a better way. In addition to this, I also took a couple notebook assignments and recreated them showing some more aspects of the importance of being an ally, and combined all of this as one.

For Spencer, his video used for his profile was what he chose to use for his translation. As per our agreement with the instructor, however, rather than recreating the video, he took the existing video, some pictures he created relating to our issue, and another video he recently made, compiled it all, and wrote up a summary for each picture and video. He demonstrated how big of an impact this issue can really have on an individual's life, and did so using a more personalized and visual approach than anywhere else throughout the website, demonstrating that these are real lives that we’re talking about here.

The paper I decided not to include was my profile. It really just didn’t make sense to include it. It demonstrated a huge part of the life of an LGBTQ ally couple in the church, yet at the same time didn’t really inspire to do much. It didn’t teach the importance of being an ally, it really just taught how one specific couple chose to demonstrate their allyship, but so did other papers throughout our magazine, but they also included why. All of my other papers were either stronger in the way which they were written, had a stronger moral attached to it, or both. The profile wasn’t written in a way that persuaded or influenced others

Spencer didn’t include his flash memoir for pretty similar reasons to why I didn’t include my profile. It wasn’t among his best work, and it really just didn’t fit. Personal stories such as that memoir didn’t have a strong connection or tie to the subject and audience we were addressing, and while it had great points, they weren’t as connected to the purposes of our other essays, so it made sense to just not include it.

One of the biggest things we learned about the writing process through the magazine project is what exactly it means to write in a group. We were only two people, and we practically had the same topic, so we thought it would be easy to merge our essays into one magazine with one purpose, and then we realized just how different our essays were. Spencer and I both had a different audience. If the ones audience would read the others papers, it would likely not make sense, or it would just not be convincing. Neither of our approaches were wrong, just very different. So, learning to find where our purposes lined up, and syncing our intentions and audience was a great learning opportunity for both of us.

We feel that the final product of our magazine has turned out to be pretty strong. We’ve transformed a couple different objectives into one main objective in a relatively short amount of time. Between the two of us there’s an extensive amount of research, with reliable sources to back ourselves up. We like the overall design, and feel like the magazine captures its audience's attention, motivates, and inspires.

While there’s always lots of room for improvement, as far as the objectives go Spencer and I have really met each of the requirements for the project. Our styles and strategies of our argument, design, and style were all adapted accordingly, as already mentioned above. We have included the majority of the genres that we were asked to write in this semester. The only thing that isn’t in their is a memoir, but there are essays with memoir elements throughout the website. We have each drafted and revised several documents, just as the project intended. As far as critical and analytical thinking goes, there was quite a bit as we had to constantly strive to see how we could keep each of our purposes in tact, without disregarding the others. In addition to all that, we consistently worked together to help edit and revise all of our work, make sure all sources were cited, and our magazine was well polished.

Robbie Smith 

Spencer Rosenvall

Professor Waldron

Magazine Project

22 April 2016