Facebook Week: Day Four Game: Street Market (episode 2)

Organizing my store, organizing my paper

Welcome back to my store. Today I’ll look at the organization of my store at Street Market and what I learnt there that can be transferred to teaching writing.

When I started adding varied items to my store, I used to place them on any vacant display. After a while I ended with DIY paints next to clothing items and electronic gadgets. Oppps! This doesn’t happen in real stores. Some relocation was due then.

I started moving displays around the store to group my products in homogenous groups: women’s clothes in one place, gadgets in another and DIY stuff in one corner. That resulted in a neat looking store that resembled good, prestigious ones.

During the relocation process, I kept thinking of writing and how we teach our students to group similar ideas together so their papers are more neat, organized and reader friendly. We tell them not to jump from one idea to the other. Organizing products in a Street Market game can be a practical embodiment of organization of ideas. Students can play the game and find for themselves how organization helps accessing products (ideas) easily.

Something else that came to my mind then. Don’t place products behind the door where not many customers wouldn’t notice them, or those who do have to bear up with the door being opened and closed frequently. Not very convenient, right? That’s what I thought too. This takes me back to addressing the audience discussed in my previous post. Don’t hide your ideas or mask them. Bring your ideas upfront to the audience to recognize and understand them. Always pay attention to your readers and their expectations.

One last word of caution with Street Market: adding decorative items to the store doesn’t earn you money or more customers; it just wastes your money and time. What about writing? Some are highly fascinated by the use of decorative language in their writing. They believe that kind of language is their means to persuade the audience. On the contrary, concise, persuasive language is more effective and efficient to reach that goal. Decorative, flowery language can impress some of audience instantly, but this doesn’t last for long.

So, this brings us to the end of my virtual business endeavor with some insight into the writing classroom.