"when you learn, teach; when you get, give."
With the "real world" just around the corner, this portfolio provides a salient opportunity to reflect on what has brought me to graduating college with a BS in Movement Science and a Minor in Writing. Completing the minor has asked me to evaluate my college experience in a way I rarely would have otherwise: through writing. As I waded through four years of writing searching for a connecting theme, nothing jumped out at me. I mean nothing which is why if the chronological organization of my portfolio seems like a cop-out, hear me out. I eventually realized even my choice of topics and tone I used were reflective of evolving worldviews, as much as they can in a four year time span. Freshman year, my pieces were more reactive and I often took a hard-line stance on issues such as online education and teacher evaluation where there were more gray areas than I acknowledged. By senior year, I chose to write about autism and neurodiversity as I have seen it, a topic full of gray areas and tensions. Admittedly, I am just twenty-two, so any worldly insights are only what I have learned through writing. That's what I love about writing, it's how I learn.
The above quote from Maya Angelou best epitomizes not only why writing is important to me, but why it is important in a larger context. I have never been comfortable with the inherent amount of introspection and selfishness that seems to come with "being a writer" and my personal workaround is that writing is a way to teach. Melding my own concentrations, science writing has been the genre that best accomplishes these goals for me as a reader and a writer, a student and a teacher. From my first reading of Stiff by Mary Roach to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, the genre has fascinated me by its ability to take topics people would typically associate with textbooks and quite literally bring them to life by bringing the human interest element to the forefront. The Immortal Life has been on the NYT Best Sellers list for over two years and is a beautiful example of the power of the scientific writing genre. My own attempts at science writing have usually devolved into more research based papers as school necessitates. I wrote a massive literature review on exercise and successful aging freshman year which I was later able to re-purpose as a TIME magazine article in the Minor gateway course as I tried my hand at science writing. This year, I tried again in the Minor capstone course as I took on autism spectrum disorders.
As I will try to establish throughout this portfolio, most of what drives my writing is a desire to engage a topic more deeply. For me, writing about a topic affords you the ultimate level of understanding. This is what I can sometimes hate about the writing process. When I read something, I take it as more authoritative than the spoken word so when I sit down to write about a topic, I feel a sense of responsibility to be as comprehensive and accessible as possible. As you can imagine, this often leads to an inequitable amount of time spent on research and outlining and significantly less time actually writing. My writing process can be summed up in 3 words: discover, learn, and discern. Initially, discovering a topic to write about and what makes that topic relevant and worth investigating. Then, the research and learning about the topic from as many angles as possible. Finally, the process of discernment from the actual composition process and making connections that never occurred to me when I was constructing an outline. Essentially, the new viewpoint or insight that makes anything worth reading. Interestingly, my entire collegiate writing career can also be mapped through these three words in that order. I am going to examine my college writing career as one long writing process.
Specifically, freshman year I discovered different genres of writing from literary analysis to scientific writing to the purely descriptive essay. I discovered topics worth learning about later on. This brings us to sophomore and junior years when I re-purposed a paper I wrote freshman year and wrote more intensely on topics I had learned in freshman year classes. For example, the topic of my English 225 seminar paper was inspired by an issue I learned about in a freshman year sport and society class. Senior year, culminated in a capstone paper where I learned more about my views on autism spectrum disorders from just composing the paper than I ever did from amassing research.
Through application of what I have discovered and learned the last four years, discernment is the final stage in the writing process. It's the complete and polished product with new insights. It's about starting that process again to find something else worth writing about, discerning something in the world around me when college and classes no longer require it of me.
The above quote from Maya Angelou best epitomizes not only why writing is important to me, but why it is important in a larger context. I have never been comfortable with the inherent amount of introspection and selfishness that seems to come with "being a writer" and my personal workaround is that writing is a way to teach. Melding my own concentrations, science writing has been the genre that best accomplishes these goals for me as a reader and a writer, a student and a teacher. From my first reading of Stiff by Mary Roach to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, the genre has fascinated me by its ability to take topics people would typically associate with textbooks and quite literally bring them to life by bringing the human interest element to the forefront. The Immortal Life has been on the NYT Best Sellers list for over two years and is a beautiful example of the power of the scientific writing genre. My own attempts at science writing have usually devolved into more research based papers as school necessitates. I wrote a massive literature review on exercise and successful aging freshman year which I was later able to re-purpose as a TIME magazine article in the Minor gateway course as I tried my hand at science writing. This year, I tried again in the Minor capstone course as I took on autism spectrum disorders.
As I will try to establish throughout this portfolio, most of what drives my writing is a desire to engage a topic more deeply. For me, writing about a topic affords you the ultimate level of understanding. This is what I can sometimes hate about the writing process. When I read something, I take it as more authoritative than the spoken word so when I sit down to write about a topic, I feel a sense of responsibility to be as comprehensive and accessible as possible. As you can imagine, this often leads to an inequitable amount of time spent on research and outlining and significantly less time actually writing. My writing process can be summed up in 3 words: discover, learn, and discern. Initially, discovering a topic to write about and what makes that topic relevant and worth investigating. Then, the research and learning about the topic from as many angles as possible. Finally, the process of discernment from the actual composition process and making connections that never occurred to me when I was constructing an outline. Essentially, the new viewpoint or insight that makes anything worth reading. Interestingly, my entire collegiate writing career can also be mapped through these three words in that order. I am going to examine my college writing career as one long writing process.
Specifically, freshman year I discovered different genres of writing from literary analysis to scientific writing to the purely descriptive essay. I discovered topics worth learning about later on. This brings us to sophomore and junior years when I re-purposed a paper I wrote freshman year and wrote more intensely on topics I had learned in freshman year classes. For example, the topic of my English 225 seminar paper was inspired by an issue I learned about in a freshman year sport and society class. Senior year, culminated in a capstone paper where I learned more about my views on autism spectrum disorders from just composing the paper than I ever did from amassing research.
Through application of what I have discovered and learned the last four years, discernment is the final stage in the writing process. It's the complete and polished product with new insights. It's about starting that process again to find something else worth writing about, discerning something in the world around me when college and classes no longer require it of me.