blog 11

Olivia and I chose to write about the second topic- the issue of why young adults are leaving church.  We decided to focus on the influences that media have on youth and young adults and how it affects their religious values.  Because media is such an extensive topic, it was quite the task deciding how to narrow it.  After a lot of discussing, we decided to focus on four elements of media: pornography, television and movies, music, and the emphasis of spirituality over being religious.  One concern of ours is that our topics may still be too broad, so we are trying to really focus and be specific in our paragraphs.  Our audience is the inter-denominational council of American religions and we are explaining our thoughts on why we believe media has led the young adults away from religious affiliations.  Because our audience is not exclusively LDS church members, it is important that we remember that we use language or phrases that not only LDS members understand, but that other religions would understand as well.  Another concern that we have is how to reference a personal experience while keeping the paper formal.  Because it was a personal experience, we were uncertain as to whether we are allowed to say words such as “I” and “we” when explaining the personal experience.  Just to be safe, we changed the story to be a true story, but did not mention that we personally knew the person; we just alluded to it.  This paper has been really interesting to write and we are excited to learn more as we start to finish our paper!