My Writing Toolset

Coming into college I wasn’t even thinking about a minor, so who knew I’d be a writing minor? Looking back on my college writing career, I’ve dabbled into different areas of writing here and there, trying to find the one I can master, but as I approach the end of my college career, I realized that I haven’t mastered one particular type of writing.

In all areas of my life, I’d like to think I’m a jack of all trades, but the master of none. Looking at all of the writing I’ve done, this phrase still applies to this aspect of my life. I’ve written in different genres with different audiences throughout the years, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert of writing (ironic because I will be getting a Minor in Writing very shortly.) But, the thing about writing in a few genres is that I’ve acquired different skills in the process that have made a better writer.

Skill #1: Incorporating research into writing

For as long as I can remember, the research paper has always been in my life because of how it was incorporated into my high school curriculum. If I had to be honest, the research paper turned me off to writing because it was structured in the way that I was pulling research from sources to support my argument. I felt like I was limited with what I could write because of this.Unsurprisingly, it followed me into college, even with my directed self-placement essay (an essay written so that my first year writing teacher could gauge my writing abilities) about groupthink, which was an argumentative research paper in disguise. The assignment was arguing about whether groupthink was a good or bad thing using the given article. It seemed like a generic paper that I had written before in high school, only with a different topic.

I was so comfortable in this genre of writing, so I knew exactly how to structure it. I took supporting ideas from the article and incorporated them into my writing to support my own claims.

“The simple problems have been solved decades and centuries ago and now the complex problems are left. One person cannot figure them out and takes a team of people and even then it might not be solved. It can be a difficult and tiring process. In science, “the size of the average team has increased by twenty percent each decade” which demonstrates that group work is becoming more important and common (Lehrer). If there are different people to challenge one’s ideas, it increases productivity.”

As seen here, I used the quote to support my own ideas about why group work is important. I also didn’t put myself in the essay at all; I make the argument from a third person perspective instead by using “one” instead.

The idea of only using third person in a research paper changed later on in my first year writing course where we had to write another argumentative research paper. But, this time it was different because it was a topic I was actually interested about: the rising cost of college, how that increase has impacted students, and its return on investment. Since this research paper required pulling from several outside sources, I had to do a lot of research and learn as much about the topic as I could. This helped with actually pulling the research into the paper because I knew what was relevant in the topic and what facts I need to support my argument.

“There is an expectation that if you go to college, then you will make more money than someone who does not. I know I expect to make more money than my parents who do not have college degrees; it is part of the motivation to attend college. Statistics show that “young adults with a bachelor's degree earned more than twice as much as those without a high school diploma or its equivalent in 2010” (“Income of Young Adults”). This big difference can add up after years of in the workforce. This shows that the four years of tuition is an investment that leads to big payoffs in the future. Therefore, people see the increased worth of education in the payoff of a higher salary in the future.”

In this paper, I went beyond just including research with my claims because I included my own thoughts along with the research. I make explicit personal claims like when I talk about the expectation of making money as a result of college, and how I expect that personally. I was able to include a little bit of personal narrative in this research piece, which is something I never did before. I had always spoken as an “objective” third person, but here I not only learned how to incorporate research into my writing, but I learned how to incorporate myself as well. By incorporating myself, I was able to make my paper stronger because I was also drawing from my own experiences to support my claims.

Skill #2: Including the right details

I dabbled in the personal narrative during my first year writing class when I wrote about my path to college. It was a five page essay, but even with that limit it was freeing to be able to write about a topic that everybody experiences differently.

Although writing about myself sounded easy, it was more challenging than I expected because I knew every detail about my life. I knew exactly who I asked for a recommendation letter and why and what extracurricular activities I did and why. In my mind, these were all important details, but I had to consider what would be important in the reader’s mind especially with a page limit. Therefore, I chose details based on what I wanted to shape my high school story around, which was that there was this “certain” path I had to follow if I wanted to get into a good college. I focused more of the story on the extracurricular activities, instead of academics, which is a big part of being a well-rounded student. With this, I learned about how critical the revising process is because each idea had to be crucial in my main argument. Looking back, I think I could have done it better because it seemed like I simplified the story too much, but it was a start for me.

“The next year was more or less of the same thing. I tried to keep building on the foundation I started. Unfortunately, my school was making it tougher on us. Due to budget cuts, clubs were being cut left and right. Spanish Club was nonexistent and the only organizations available were Freshmen Mentor Program, National Honor Society, and sports.”

By saying “the next year was more or less of the same thing,” I spared the audience the details of exactly what the next year was like because it was similar to the previous year I mentioned a paragraph before. It wasn’t that easy to get to this statement because it took hours of revision to cut it down to this one sentence.

I knew the personal narrative was a genre that I liked, so I went further by taking “Art of the Essay.” I had to record any event in my life, then making a comprehendible essay out of the video. It was a weird task because how was I supposed to make something mundane in my life into something that the audience would care about?

I recorded a video of me getting ready to go out on a Friday night as well as my roommates getting ready. Both of our experiences are different, so I wrote about the difference in how long it takes each of us to get ready and my own insecurities about not wearing makeup.

Because it was a video, the essay followed a chronological order, which I’ve heard can be a boring strategy to use, but this assignment forced me to look at the details carefully and pick out what’s important and what’s not. In choosing the details, I thought about what would capture the reader’s attention and what material they could relate to. I added my own thoughts that couldn’t be captured on camera; these emotions made the essay stronger. I realized that with any essay that not the whole story is told and it’s up to the author to decide what they want to include and delete.

“The details of the party aren’t important because it’s the same as the other nights. It’s dark and I can’t make much of anybody’s faces. I slowly seep into the light because the unknown faces in the darkness make me weary of it. I’ll probably end up doing something stupid and people don’t need to see that. A familiar face comes to join me and as we exchange random, meaningless bullshit.”

This part of the essay wasn’t recorded, but I included it because it allowed me to add beyond what the reader visually saw at the party to give more meat to the story. I knew that writing a personal essay involved attention to detail and being honest about the subject matter, so I put more of myself in the essay with my own thought process to let the audience connect with me.

Skill #3: Being creative

Writing is a creative outlet, but I didn’t see it in that way until I got to new media writing. In my new media writing class, I was able to explore different types of new media including Twitter, blogs, and Vine. The class taught me a new way of looking at writing. I always thought of writing as one dimensional in the forms of essays, and I hadn’t thought of it as something more with multimodal elements.

We had a whole section devoted to selfies where we had to take four different selfies that had showed our character and ethos. With this project, I had to learn to be creative in the process of taking selfies; it was more than just taking a picture of my own face. I had to pay attention to all of the elements around me like lighting, tone, and colors. It was about the angles and I took a selfie laying down on my side to show a different angle of my face. I wish I had a better camera on my phone at the time because some of the images are not as crisp as I’d like them to be.

For the Vine project, we had to show how our ethos was different in the digital world and the real world. The project showed me how important it is to consider the boundaries of the medium I was using for my work. In this case, that I was constrained by time, so I had to be aware of that in order to deliver my message effectively. I wrote on a piece of paper questioning whether the different “me’s” presented on social media are the same person. Since I handwrote it, it took a long time, so I bypassed this issue by using editing software to speed my video up.

The skills I learned in new media writing made me realize that I had sparks of creativity within myself. Many times, I don’t think I do, but seeing my final products made me realize that I do. I took this creativity with me as I explored other genres of writing.

Skill #4: Extracting something new from a common figure or idea

At this point, I had already dabbled into two areas of writing I knew I was interested in, but I wanted to try something new that I could add to my repertoire of writing knowledge. I decided to try my hand at nature writing because it was essentially a personal narrative with a twist of nature in it.

Most of the nature essays we read in class had some new connection to the real world that I didn’t see before reading the essay. We read a whole essay focused on blue jays that was really a commentary revolved around simplicity in the human world. Two things that are completely unrelated at first sight, but the author makes the connection visible between the two.

In order to create a captivating nature essay, I knew I had to give the audience a new insight into their everyday common interactions with nature like the author did in the bluebird essay. I had to learn how to connect two (seemingly) unrelated ideas: the natural world and the human world. In my “Lost in the Woods” essay, I focused the whole essay on a day trip to the park. It’s about how the woods in the park look like it is “real” nature at first, but it’s really not because of the human elements surrounding everything and how humans had a hand in creating the woods.

“I thought descending down those stairs meant that I was diving head first into nature and shedding the containments from the real world, but no I wasn’t. There were still aspects from the human world all around me and they prevented me from being fully immersed in nature. The biker was one of them. There was the lady jogging up and down the stairs, and all of the cars parked in the parking lot. I mean, we were in a human constructed park after all! Of course, there were going to be human elements, but I didn’t think they would be present inside the actual woods. The stairs. The empty water bottle. The posts marking the trail number. The more I thought about it, that dirt trail I first trekked on was probably made by humans. I was just fooled into thinking it was a naturally made path because I was so used to the paved sidewalk.”

By pulling out these little details that I noticed about the park and the woods (the biker, parked cars, trash, and jogger), I was able to let the audience see how intertwined the real world and the natural world are. I pointed out a connection that wasn’t really obvious if the reader didn’t think about it, so by simply pointing out this new idea, I help the reader see that connection. Even for me, when I was writing about this, I wasn’t completely sure this connection was there and it took a lot of time to reflect on what I felt that day at the park. I think I was able to learn something new from a regular day by not just taking it at face value and thinking about it more.

Skill #5: Asking the right questions

All of this writing has led me to my final writing class, the capstone. For my capstone writing project, I embarked on a journey of interviewing people about their college experience from either a first generation college student viewpoint or a continuing generation college student view because I wanted to directly compare these differences and see what they actually are from a variety of people’s first hand experiences. I also wanted to find out what extra support first gens could benefit from. Journalism wasn’t an area that I’ve dabbled in, and I knew there would be a steep learning curve because I had to start interviewing people quickly.

I admit that it took a few trial and error runs before I got to a good place about asking questions and making the interviewees comfortable. But, I learned it’s about trying to get them comfortable and have them talk more about their life. I had to reflect about my own answers to those questions because I wanted to see if they were meaningful enough to ask other people. I wanted to ask questions that would make them think – questions that would show something new that would change people’s pre-conceived notion of the college experience. I’m also writing my own story, under the guise that someone is interviewing me (but it’s really just me answering my own questions), so that’s kind of like a personal narrative.

As I’m going through the transcribing process, I have to use my own discretion when it comes to including the right details. Sometimes the interviewees would go on tangents, although interesting ones, that don’t lend to my overall argument. There are also places where I have to add more context, so the reader understands what the interviewee is talking about.

In designing my website to host the interviews, I had to tap in the creative skills I learned before. Seeing that this website fell into new media writing, I had to create something aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate. From the feedback I’ve gotten from my peers, I think I was able to do this part well.

With the work I’ve done on my capstone project, it feels like a culmination of everything I’ve learned thus far and I’m happy with the product. It feels like this project wouldn’t have been possible four years ago.

New skills in the future…

Thinking back on everything, I’ve acquired many skills throughout my writing career. It seems like I’ve done similar, but different works. It feels like I haven’t mastered a particular genre, but I think I’ve come close to mastering the personal narrative because most of the work I’ve done has surrounded this genre just in different forms. I wrote them in my first year writing course, “Art of the Essay,” nature writing course, and something like it now in my capstone project. This essay I’m writing right now is a form of a personal narrative!

Even though my works have been in similar genres, as a writer, I’m not afraid to try new things to help myself become a better writer. I know that I have to step outside of my comfort zone in order to improve my writing. I tried doing it by writing about nature, recording Vines (filming video scares me), and interviewing a bunch of people to create a commentary on a bigger issue.

I think most of the writing I will be doing in the future will be personal side projects in new media writing like blogs or Twitter. I really enjoy writing in the personal narrative and I think that’s where my next pieces of writing will take me. Who knows maybe after a few years in the corporate world I’ll take writing from a hobby to something more than that. Even though I don’t feel like a master of writing (I don’t know is there such a thing?), I feel confident enough in it.