Project Reflection

Final Project Reflection
Salman Ahmed
For the final project my group chose to create a twitter account for the character William, from “Flight Patterns” by Sherman Alexei. We chose this piece of work because we felt that out of all of the short stories we covered, “Flight Patterns” was a story we understood well and could relate too. The characters from the story were dynamic and story left much to interpretation for the readers. “Flight Patterns” was also a good fit because it was a more modern story, and as such as students it was easier for us to relate to the main character of the story, William.
We chose to create a twitter account for William because the story did not expand deeply upon his character. Rather, the story focused around the story of the taxi driver and the ordeals that he went through. We felt that through Twitter, we could gain insight to the thoughts and actions of William. Also, because Twitter is a mostly informal, short entry, journal, we felt that it allowed us a great deal of flexibility in expressing William’s thoughts. William himself is not the most conventional character in the story, rather his character was expressed informally. Because of this, we found that Twitter would make a good match for the final project.
Each of us in the group tried to contribute to the Twitter account, making 3-4 entries each. For the entries that I made, I tried to focus on the reaction of William to what the taxi driver told him. I felt that the taxi driver instantly matured William, and thus he cared more for his family than his work. I felt that this was not really expressed in the story, as the end of the story does not expand on how William feels about what he learned, rather it was just a short reaction (in calling his wife). Because of this, I felt that this would be a good topic to write about in the entries as to expand on the development of his character throughout the short story and at the conclusion of it.
Selecting this topic worked well for me as my group mates selected similar, but different topics. This worked perfectly as William is such a dynamic character. In the story, he has a wide range of emotions and actions. At the beginning of the story, he seemed immature and young, naïve to the world. At the end of the story, he transforms and becomes much more mature as he thinks more about how his traveling can affect his family and how he cannot control what happens at home while he is gone. William’s thoughts and actions were all over the map throughout the story, and as such our Twitter representation of William’s thoughts and actions too were random and diverse.
There are several things I think we could have improved upon in our project. Because it was four different people contributing to the Twitter, it was hard to coordinate the direction of the project. Also, I felt that the postings were not exactly chronological, and I wish that Twitter would allow more control over the order of the postings (post-written editing). Overall though, I felt that our project was representative of the character presented in the text and thus was a success.
http://twitter.com/WilliamAmerican