6.15.2021

 Today we continued working in our groups, and I decided to share the doublespeak concept. Turns out, the team was very keen about the topic, and so we chose to switch the entire direction. From there on, we discussed possible names for the journal, but since the target audience was teenagers, we made sure to devise a quirky yet eye-catching name. In the end, we were all in favor of “D-speak Busters”, which is a spin-off of the infamous show, “Ghost Busters”. Next, we started to edit layouts, adding necessary pages, and coming up with the contents of each section. Although we want our audience to focus on our written articles, we also thought that it would be beneficial and perhaps improve our clarity, if we also add a page that introduced Doublespeak. Thus, I was assigned to finish the page by the next class. Through researching thoroughly, I learned that Doublespeak was analogous to George Orwell’s famous “1984”, and was even more surprised that it didn’t exist before the publishing of the book being, 1949. From this, I was amazed by the influence that media has had, to the point of creating a word that was nevertheless unnecessary, if it wasn’t for intentional language manipulation of the news industry.

Another piece of knowledge that I attained from today’s research, was the many variations of doublespeak. What's more, I was surprised that I had used some of D-speak’s tactics in my past writings. Especially the inflation of language and gobbledygook, where sentences are either overly hysterical or purposefully lengthy, reflected my use of English. When I come to think of it, I tend to use an abundance of idioms or phrases which would elongate my opinion, and this comes unnoticed as I had only acknowledged this characteristic as an improvement in vocabulary. However, reading the examples of each tactic made me realize the significance of clarity in writing. As much as I would like to reach the expected word limit, there is no way people would read a disorganized and long essay. Therefore, a lesson was learned about coherency and transparency in writing, and it made me want to improve my current sentence-constructing abilities through double checking my work for any D-speak, as well as utilizing tools such as the Readability feature in order to have a good estimate on the perplexity of my work. The last thing I want is for our website which is aimed to bust d-speak, INCLUDE d-speak, so I would like to push for quality peer-editing, prior to its submission. In conclusion, I believe we did pretty well with adapting to the new changes and focusing on organizing the necessary components for future development.