ELA8, CSS, Sferrazza

Now that your outline has been approved by your teacher, you can begin your draft. Don't worry about getting things perfect. You will have a chance to get some feedback and work on editing before you submit your final draft.

Organizing your blog post:

1.Title: A good title is important for a blog post as it needs to catch the reader's eye after it is posted and the title might show up in a social media post, a menu of blog posts or as a link in another article. PLEASE! Remember to capitalize all main words in a title. 

2. Introduction: When writing your introduction, you want to keep one question top of mind: How can I establish credibility and get my audience to care and be interested about the resources I plan to share with them?

Feel free to leave the introduction for last, too. Sometimes it’s easier to introduce your post after you’ve written the real meat of it.  Your introduction should hook the reader. Introduce your overall topic and it relates to the theme of future trends and gives a short summary of what will be covered in your blog post. 

3. Body:

Remember, the body follows through on what you promised in the introduction. Each resource you listed in your planning will have a short paragraph. Write an introductory sentence describing the resource, a summary of the resource and include a quote within your paragraph also. Blog posts often have subtitles as well to chunk up the text as a reader is scrolling through the page. Make sure to include titles which are often bolded and in a different font. 

4. Conclusion: Your conclusion is where you’ll  briefly comment on the effects of your futuristic topic and the importance of knowing about it.  Sometimes you can leave your reader with a question or thought.

5. Hyperlinks and quotes: Remember in this assignment you will be required to create a hyperlink to the resource and a properly formatted quote. The next two pages will help with that. 

Here is an example of a blog post:

Is a Tiny House for You?

By the time you reach the age where you want to own your own home, the cost may be way beyond your reach or perhaps there will hardly be any land left to build something on! One trend of housing in the future seems to be that of tiny homes. If you are curious about what exactly a tiny home is, if you want to see a glimpse inside a family tiny home and maybe even get serious about building one, listed below are several resources to get you on your way.

What is the tiny house movement?

A good place to start is a website called The Tiny Life, which supplies a range of information and resources about tiny homes. The site explains what exactly the movement is all about,

 " Simply  put, the trend toward tiny houses has become a social movement. People are choosing to downsize the space they live in, simplify, and live with less. People are embracing the tiny life philosophy and the freedom that accompanies the tiny house lifestyle." (Martin, 2018)

Living with a family of five!

Check out this short video from the BBC that gives an inside look at a functioning tiny house that holds a family of five! As the camera moves throughout the house one can see how everything in it must serve an important function. For example we see how the wall shelf folds down to become a table as the mother of family says “Because it’s so small everything has to do more than one thing.

Building a tiny house

A young couple have recorded 80 short videos on the construction of their tiny home. The videos show step by step construction of their tiny home. In the first interview, they explain what motivated them: “We are both 28 and having been renting our entire adult lives and a regular house has always seemed out of reach, but this tiny house concept seems really appealing and like something we could actually achieve.” Each video comes with links in the transcript to their website, social media page, and resources that they have used. The videos are entertaining and well produced and for anyone serious about building or just curious to learn how they are built these videos are a good find.

In the future, it will be interesting to see if more and more people make the choice to simplify and downsize, including where they live. 

When you are finished your draft submit it under the drop-box: Expository Draft:  Unit 3.

Once your teacher has marked your draft and given you some feedback on suggestions for revising in your template,  complete the mini-lessons that follow, make your revisions in the template and submit your work to the drop-box: Expository Final Draft:  Unit 3.