My Evolution as a Writer
The top bun
If this essay were like most I have written in college, it would begin with a personal story, meant to grab the reader’s attention. So here’s that personal anecdote:
There was a giant poster of a hamburger on the whiteboard of my second grade classroom. It was the “essay hamburger” used to teach eight year olds how to write a basic paper. The buns were the introductory and conclusion paragraphs. The lettuce, meat, and cheese were each a paragraph that contributed to what you had said you were going to talk about in the “bun paragraph.”
This “essay hamburger” didn’t go away for many years. Every essay I wrote for three years consisted of five paragraphs. It didn’t matter what type of paper I was writing; it had a bun topper, lettuce, meat, cheese, and a bun bottom. But as I got better at writing, I wanted to push the confines of the hamburger structure. What if I needed four middle paragraphs? Could I add some tomato? But I was told to stick to the five-paragraph burger, at least until I was older.
I easily could have been stuck in hamburger-land for many more years. However, in fifth grade, I was blessed with Mrs. Curry as my humanities teacher. Mrs. Curry was a big proponent of a well-structured essay constructed from well-thought-out sentences. (She threw the boring “subject-verb-direct object” sentence format out the window when she had her eleven year olds memorize every prepositional phrase.) We may have been young, but Mrs. Curry was going to teach us how to write well, and that meant adding some new ingredients to the hamburger.
Suddenly, I was creating complex sentences, using two paragraphs in an introduction, and falling in love with writing. Mrs. Curry taught us how to diagram sentences, play with our vocabularies, and write poetry. She hung each piece of writing on the wall in front of our previous one, so we could see how we were improving. She instilled in us the rules of good writing, all the while reminding us that they were really just guidelines. The rules were meant to be broken, and my writing was never the same.
I began to write for fun. I published a “good news only” newspaper with my best friend and started a diary. I entered a screenplay into a writing competition and won a prize! In middle school and high school, I wrote for the school paper. At seventeen, I went to journalism camp to take a writing class. I was the only one of my friends who looked forward to doing countless college application essays over taking the ACT.
All of these writing experiences led me to the University of Michigan and a Minor in Writing. And while my evolution as a writer may have begun as a second grader staring at the “essay hamburger” on the whiteboard, this paper will focus on my development from freshman to senior year of college. Throughout those four years, I have learned to incorporate creativity and personality into academic writing, used writing as a way to process events in my personal life, and learned to successfully integrate multimedia into my assignments. This is my journey.
The lettuce: incorporating creativity and personality into academic writing
Coming into college I viewed different types of writing as separate from one another. Blogging was very different from creative fiction, which was completely distinct from research papers and persuasive essays. The biggest divide was between what I deemed “creative” writing versus “academic” writing. The two were separated by a vast valley that was never to be crossed. “Academic” writing was boring, dry, and purposeful. “Creative” writing contained personality and was associated with storytelling.
My first Michigan writing course challenged this notion. The assignment was to write a research paper on any topic, and the teacher encouraged the class to think “outside the box” and inject creativity into the essay. So I tried something completely new and began my research paper with a personal anecdote. The first sentence read, “I was following the University of Chicago on Twitter.” Not exactly the way I would typically open a well-researched argumentative piece on the increasing competitiveness of the college application process, reasons for this increased competition, and how it affects high school students. However, it worked. For the first time, my research paper had my voice and was interesting, personal, and engaging.
Unfortunately, I didn’t always remember that the “academic” and “creative” realms could be combined. Sophomore year’s argumentative essay analyzing The Andy Griffith Show for Communication Studies 371 (an upper level writing requirement course) was as dry as could be.
“The Andy Griffith Show portrayed a small-town American utopia of exemplary cultural values with its jovial characters and simple plot lines. However, this ideal setting was also achieved through the show’s exclusion of real, societal changes like the Civil Rights Movement and Women’s Liberation Movements, which underscore Americans desire to escape the growing turmoil of the 1960s.”
Are you snoring yet? I am. Throughout college, I’ve had to constantly remind myself that it’s okay (and wonderful!) to be creative in academic writing. Luckily, in junior year’s English 225 class, I remembered to do it. In “Words matter: how the definition of an eating disorder is restricting the pursuit of treatment,” I used a story about my personal struggle with an eating disorder before introducing research. In the end, I think the personal anecdote created a stronger argument because I was given more credibility as an author for having lived through the disorder I was writing about.
Breaking down the psychological barrier in my mind that divided “academic” and “creative” writing hasn’t always been easy. I’ve had my fair share of successes and failures, but I am certainly gaining traction when it comes to incorporating creativity and personality into academic writing.
The meat: using writing as a way to process events in my personal life
One of the larger themes I find in my college writing is my selection of what I write about. Fortunately, my writing courses have had a great deal of freedom when it comes to assignment prompts. When I am afforded the option to write about anything in the world, I choose to write about things that have happened in my life that I am struggling to understand. I use writing to process these major “life events.”
My freshman year, I wanted to understand the college party culture. So, I wrote an eight page reflective essay about my weekends.
“It wasn’t until I was drunkenly sobbing hysterically in a champagne balloon dress behind a building in late January that I knew something was actually wrong. I had finally figured out that partying every weekend was like the concept of diminishing marginal utility they kept telling me about in my economics class: the first weekend gives you the greatest joy, the second slightly less, and the thirtieth barely any at all.”
The writing process, complete with brainstorming, drafting, revising, and submission, provided a sort of therapy. It was a chance to think and talk about something I could not explain to a friend over coffee or to my mom on the phone. I was disillusioned by the fraternity house “ragers” and needed to discover what I wanted from my college experience. Writing was a way to do that.
During sophomore and junior years, I wrote through another deeply personal time in my life: my eating disorder recovery. In the fall of sophomore year, I entered counseling for bulimia. It was one of the darkest periods of my life, but I found that through writing I could release my pain and convert it into something beautiful. In sophomore year’s creative writing course, I wrote a fictional story about two sisters. The protagonist described her sister's spiral into a dangerous eating disorder. Reading it now, I can see how closely I incorporated my own experience into those characters.
Then, one year later as a junior, I wrote the argumentative / research paper mentioned earlier, “Words matter: how the definition of an eating disorder is restricting the pursuit of treatment.” Again, this was a way to process my experience. But this time, I was on the other side of my struggle, feeling healthy and wanting to contribute to a greater conversation about eating disorders in our culture. Writing provided a way to do that.
The cheese: learning to successfully integrate multimedia into assignments
Incorporating creativity and personality into academic writing is just one way I have learned to make my writing more engaging for the reader. The past four years have also showed me how to successfully integrate multimedia into my assignments. Looking at writing from freshman year, I struggle to find a single piece of writing that is not text in a Word document. Even my research papers lack informative charts that could break up large chunks of paragraphs.
It was the Minor in Writing gateway course during my sophomore year that really changed the way I approached writing and media. The assignment asked us to “repurpose” and then “remediate” something we had written. So first, I had to take a piece of writing from a previous college course and transform it into an entirely new piece of writing. Then, I had to take that "repurposed" writing and "remediate" it, or change it from writing to a different form of media.
I started with the piece of writing from freshman year (excerpted above) about the college party culture. The original piece used my personal experiences in college to take the reader on a reflective journey through my thinking and development. I chose to use some of these themes about partying and the hook-up culture and "repurposed" them into a larger critique of the Greek system at the University of Michigan. Then, I had to “remediate” that essay. A classmate suggested making a podcast (something I had never done before). After some podcast research and Sound Cloud tutorials, I was creating a NPR-style podcast where I interviewed myself. My questions and responses were drawn from the argumentative essay. The final product had introductory music too! (You can check out both the repurposed and remediated pieces under the "Remediation Assignment" tab of this portfolio.)
So when I was given another remediation assignment in my junior year English 225 course, I was ready to challenge myself even further. I took a scientific research paper on nutritional “super foods” and made a mini-documentary. Armed with my camera, I went to the local Kroger and filmed the aisles of products. I incorporated photos found online, my own video, graphics, music, and voiceover to make the same scientific argument about super foods a lot more interesting.
I’ve also taken my love of multimedia outside the classroom. Over the summer, I interviewed the founder of an Ann Arbor mobile app startup called StatusOwl that launched in the fall of 2014. I’ve learned in my writing classes that multimedia projects are some of the most engaging to read, so in preparing the article, I wanted to add visual appeal to the standard text. I posted the final interview on medium.com, a graphic and modern blog posting forum, and I used high-quality photos of the mobile app to break up text and provide color. In a world of Buzzfeed gifs and fast-paced video, it was rewarding to create an interesting interview that was also visually stimulating. That article showed me that learning to integrate multimedia into writing extends far beyond classroom walls.
The bottom bun
And we’ve reached the last piece of the paper: the bottom bun, the conclusion. I guess the “essay hamburger” is still pretty applicable! After analyzing my college writing, I’ve found I can be creative in my “academic” papers, I like to write about my life events as a way to process them, and sometimes using multimedia elements can dramatically improve plain text.
These threads through my writing journey can also be seen in my Writing Minor Capstone Project, featured in this ePortfolio. For my final project, I chose to create and execute a University of Michigan Bucket List. Each item would be captured in multimedia: photos, video, and/or sound. A written summary of my experience completing the list item accompanies the media. This summary also contains research about each item. For example, before I painted “the rock” with friends, I wanted to understand: where did the rock come from, why is it a tradition, and how have other students interacted with it? There’s also a reflection on the completion of the list, which explores ideas of nostalgia and the complex emotions of closing this chapter of my life.
I chose to pursue this project because as a college senior, I am struggling to come to terms with my last year at this spectacular institution. By recording these Michigan “must-do” activities, I am not only creating an interesting “bucket list” website where any Michigan student could find ideas for what to do on campus and in the city of Ann Arbor, but I’m making the most of out my last year. Without even realizing it, I developed a capstone project that reflects how I’ve grown as a writer.
But I think it’s important to stress that my writing journey has only begun. At twenty-one, I have a lot of writing left to do: in my career, in my volunteer work, and for myself. These common threads that I can identify in my writing will continue to grow and change. New trends will emerge. Weaknesses will become strengths. And to my excitement, the possibilities are endless.