Today I was introduced to blackout poems. I had see these on social media but I had never made one before. I really like the concept, as well as the aesthetic of blackout poems, and think it is a great way to explore a topic in further detail. Below are some initial Google inspiration references that I looked at to get a better idea how they are done. There are multiple ways that these can be made - there's even opportunity to create designs and graphics that relate to the text of the theme.
For our initial task today, we structured our blackout poems slightly differently than the conventional way. We started off by taking a news article that we were interested in - I chose one focusing on the recent name change of Facebook to Meta - and then we selected the words and phrases that we thought captured the main essence of the text. We wrote these down on a separate piece of paper until we were satisfied with our choices.
After this, I took those words and outlined them in pencil so that I would avoid accidentally marking out the wrong text.
Finally, I took a marker pen and blacked out all of the words that I didn't need. The aim was to see how much I could remove from the original text whilst still keeping the message with the words I decided would remain. Although blackout poems are usually structured to actually read well, due to the nature of the workshop task, our final outcomes don't necessarily make sense. Below is how mine turned out.
"Facebook, social media giant, virtual world, socialise, metaverse, company, iconic, represent, technology, billions of dollars, reputation, damaging, dangerous, rebranded, name"
Now that we had experience making a blackout poem, our second task was to repeat this process but with another text. Instead, we took one of the top 17 goals (globalgoals.org), I chose goal 3 - Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all ages - and selected words/phrases which I believed represented the entire message of the text.
I went in again and blacked-out the rest of the words that I didn't choose to keep. This was what I was left with:
Finally, I applied this technique to my own topic, CBT, and worked on an article about the key principles of cognitive behavioural therapy (https://www.notion.so/Blackout-Poems-2547a07519ae48d2bc6171c252aa7aff#878c2edc8a1e4071bb94147ff9faf133). I decided to focus on the largest paragraph section to see how well I could keep the original essence of the information. We were also introduced to a slightly different approach - to select objects, adjectives and verbs from our text instead of any particular phrase/word we thought were relevant.
In order to make this easier for me, I made a colour key where: