By Dana Louey and Katrina Salvador

Our Week 7 Monday class saw us pitching our ideas for the critical piece that will be published on our anthology website. The class was designed to be interactive, with each person proposing their idea and then receiving feedback and further points of consideration in return. It demonstrated the benefits of group discussion and collaboration, as each topic was fleshed out and our classmates could provide us with new or interesting angles that we hadn’t initially considered, as well as further examples that we could draw on. Overall, everyone’s pitches formed a highly varied pool of ideas – together, the class with be looking critically at a range of films, film genres, TV series, music, pop culture trends, food and much more.

Important to note, donuts were present in this class to fuel some of our energy and encourage the flow of ideas, generously gifted by Alexia. After 2 and a half hours of brainstorming our last half hour saw us creating something of a ‘lucky dip’ out of our (unashamedly) empty donut box through which we contributed ideas for the name of our website.

Wednesday’s grammar session made us put our editing hats on as we focussed on the grammatical errors that were common in our Project Brief 2 assessment tasks.
The topics we covered were:

• Passive and active voices
• The difference between colons and semicolons
• The different types of dashes (hyphen, en-dash, em-dash)
• It’s versus its
• Effect versus affect

Alexia introduced the class with the simple activity of reading out sentences by switching from a passive voice (filled with film references) to an active voice. This made us realise how important it is to maintain an active voice in a critical review and how easy it is to trap yourself into that passive voice rabbit-hole.