This essay, written for my Sweetland Minor in Writing capstone course, will provide you with insight into my evolution as a writer. Throughout my time in the minor, I found the environments where I complete my best work, figured out the types of assignments I enjoy, and rediscovered my love of writing.
The paper includes writing artifacts, added through my revision process, intended to provide you with an idea of the diverse types of writing this program has allowed me to explore. Without the Sweetland Minor in Writing, I might still be piecing together essays on Microsoft Word, unaware of how much the ability to express myself through word means to me.
The paper includes writing artifacts, added through my revision process, intended to provide you with an idea of the diverse types of writing this program has allowed me to explore. Without the Sweetland Minor in Writing, I might still be piecing together essays on Microsoft Word, unaware of how much the ability to express myself through word means to me.
This is the first essay I have written for the writing minor. I will complete the program after this capstone course, and ironically I can't compare my essays from the beginning of this experience to this "writer's evolution" essay because those essays don't exist. Well, technically I wrote essays for English 325, but I took that course before the gateway so I refuse to count it. When my gateway professor, Naomi, explained that our assignments could (and would) take many forms, including web pages, social media, and videos, a switch flipped in my head. I decided I was not going to write an essay for the duration of the course. This was partially to challenge myself to try new ways to express my ideas, and partly because I was sick of writing double-spaced, twelve-point font papers. Granted, Naomi tricked me a bit, as all of our assignments were still writing, but for some reason the projects felt new and fresh and inspiring--I was looking forward to my homework, spending the majority of my time in the library on work for my gateway course. I carried this decision into my other courses for the minor more so by necessity than by choice. Once I discovered this way of writing, this ability to combine media and diction rather than simply put text on a page, it was impossible to go back to my old way of thinking. The minor has allowed me to evolve into a writer who is willing to take risks and attempt foreign writing forms; my pride now derives from the quality of my writing projects and the way they challenge me to create more than just a paper than on the percentage a professor places in red ink on the top of my essays.
Reflecting upon my childhood, I always preferred writing that incorporated more than a simple five-paragraph essay structure. A first grade task asking me to create a book about my favorite things allowed me to express my love for the gooey goodness of melted cheese through text about and drawings of this delicious lunch food. Adapting books into plays in fifth grade gave me free reign to write about and perform a story for the rest of the class. This excitement about writing as a way to learn and demonstrate new skills faded sometime between an encyclopedia-researched middle school project about Panama and an senior year essay arguing Jude the Obscure exhibits anti-hero tendencies. By college, I forgot why I love to write. My essays from my first year writing requirement display this former tendency. I recall being so irritated when I got an A- on my final paper. I wasn't mad at my professor, however, I was mad at myself. How could I not get an A when the directions for the essay were clearly laid out? What mistakes did I make when synthesizing The Odyssey and Medea, Lysistrata and the Eumenides? It was a failure on my part.
These sentiments carried over to my other courses. Memos for my public policy major had a strict format I struggled to stick to. Public health essays needed to include concepts and vocabulary from class. Even French essays required complying with rules set by my professor. Any points off these papers were things I did wrong, things I chalked up to poor writing skills.
Then I joined the Minor in Writing. The prompts were open ended, the rubrics were more about content quality than structure, and creativity was encouraged. For our first assignment in the gateway course, we were supposed to write an essay about what motivates us to write. Somehow I got the idea to take on a stop-motion video project, and Naomi was very encouraging. My grade was based on my willingness to try new writing forms and my argument for why I write. I spent hours cutting out pictures from magazines and piecing together construction paper versions of the Capitol building, illustrating my affinity for writing through a combination of pictures and a voiceover. For the first time, my "essay" wasn't graded against twenty or thirty other similar essays. Each one was evaluated for its unique story and the effort put into the piece.
As I continued my gateway course, I explored with websites and social media. For my re-mediating project, a task in which I had to take a previous work and present it through some form of media, I created a Pinterest page as if I was The U-M's Career Center, highlighting some different internship opportunities available for students from a variety of different majors in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. This was a very tasking project, as it required me to synthesize research, text, and images in a way that was very foreign to me. I didn't know how to create a project like this, but I had enough faith in myself and didn't have to worry so much about grading. I really enjoy how this project turned out, and it opened my eyes to a whole different genre of writing I never knew existed. Web-writing challenged me to incorporate visuals and text using a new platform. It required me to think spatially and analytically, to focus on logical arguments and on what media platform would best present these arguments. Ever since this course, I have constantly challenged myself with my assignments, working to learn new writing styles instead of just doing what I already know how to do. By separating my writing from the grading process, I have grown as a writer and complete my best work when I come at a project from this mindset.
A few pieces of my writing have been completely free from a rubric. I wrote a letter to the editor following last year's State of the Union Address, and it ended up getting published in the Michigan Daily and the Detroit Free Press. I was upset about the republican response to the speech, and I was "prompted" by a circumstance rather than by a syllabus. This was one of my proudest moments as a writer. Obviously, I am my own worst critic, and I can look at the piece and see a million different changes I would make were I to write it all over again, but I got so much pleasure writing this and it has shown me how central writing is to my life. If I see things I disagree with, I can use a pen to get through those frustrations to enact change. It has opened up many new career possibilities for me, including speechwriting and ghostwriting, supporting political players who align with my ideology.
Another Minor in Writing requirement, taking an upper-level course with a significant amount of writing, allowed me to explore another way to advocate through writing. This past winter I participated in the Michigan in Washington program, which allowed me to spend a semester working and studying in D.C. I interned with a long-term care policy and advocacy organization, and the course associated with the program entailed an extensive research paper on a topic of my choosing. I focused on poor staffing at nursing facilities, which was something I analyzed each day at my internship. While research is not where I want to spend my post-graduate time, it was a great learning experience and I liked figuring out how to conduct scientific research on a topic I spent time with during my internship. I used math and data charts to aggregate the evidence into an argument. Even though the paper was graded, I didn't worry very much about my score. I just tried to figure out how to best present the research in a way that would make people understand the issue and want to enact change. Investigating a topic related to my career interests while gaining course credit was a fresh experience from my usual tasks of analyzing data about issues that aren't salient with me.
The Minor in Writing capstone course for which this e-portfolio was created, was based on gamified points rather than typical grades. I selectively chose which assignments to complete (outside of the required essay and capstone project). These tasks, which had a certain number of points attached to them, allowed me to gain credit by working towards my final project in a way that best fit my learning style. Students were able to assign themselves with a capstone project, and I chose to write a State of the Union Address as if I were one of President Obama's speechwriters preparing for the 2015 speech. This is the culmination of my path toward redefining writing; assignments become something I craft for myself rather than something I complete for a professor. Of course, the project will be factored into my final grade, but I am interested in political speechwriting and am able explore this field on my own volition. I want to produce quality work because I want to see how successful I could be in my dream job rather than because I want to be successful in the classroom.
This is one of the greatest things about the Minor - I have been able to explore these types of writing with substantial faculty support and without worrying about a numerical score associated with the writing. This allows me to make autonomous decisions about genre, structure, style, and tone. I have adopted the persona of a writer not because it is assigned to me in the classroom, but because I task myself with assignments.