AUTHOR'S NOTE

I have known for a long time that writing was more than just a hobby for me— it’s a passion that I want to continue for many years to come. This love has fostered a dedication to the craft, leading me to seek different opportunities that allow me to practice and improve. With years of involvement in various extracurricular writing-based organizations, I have formed a fixation around the idea of pursuing a writing-based career, ideally in journalism. This goal seemed exciting and maybe even attainable, but upon reaching this realization, I was faced with what I thought would be a significant obstacle in moving forward: the University of Michigan does not offer a program in Journalism. 

No major. Not even a minor. 

I was unsure of how to proceed when learning this information. My advisor had suggested an English major, but I wanted to focus more on writing than reading. She then suggested a Creative Writing minor, but I wanted to create primarily non-fiction pieces. We then discussed the minor in Writing: a small, focused, admit-only program that allows the student to explore their interests in a personalized manner. The idea of this was extremely intriguing to me. The program was flexible enough where I could work at not only improving my desired area of study but also explore a wide range of different mediums. I applied immediately and upon acceptance, registered for Writing 220: the Gateway course. 

To be completely honest, I was intimidated by the class as soon as I received the syllabus. The course was entirely based upon the concept of being experimental. As students, we were encouraged to stray away from what we know and explore ideas that may be unfamiliar or somewhat daunting. We were asked to choose a piece of writing we had already written and essentially tear it apart, taking bits of it as inspiration for future “experiments”. What we did with those bits were up to us. We had complete free range as to what direction we could go in— a concept that both stimulated and challenged me. For this origin piece, I selected a satirical essay entitled “The Feminist Disease”, which is featured in my Work section of this website. I had written this piece for The Michigan Daily as a Freshman in college and was proud of its outcome. It also is centered around the topic of feminism, a subject I wanted to further explore in the semester to come. 

For my first experiment, I chose to transform the idea of feminism being hereditary into a personal narrative about the strong women in my family. To be fair, this was not out of my comfort zone. In fact, personal narratives are my favorite type of genre to write. I opted for this type of piece because I subconsciously wanted to ease into the course. This felt like cautiously dipping my toes in to feel out the atmosphere. 

My second experiment was definitely the most exciting process for me. I envisioned creating an educational Youtube video centered around landmark Supreme Court reproductive rights cases. I wanted to mimic something like Crash Course, as this video style had been the most helpful for me in the past when learning new information. The goal of this video was to be as informative as possible while still actively engaging the viewer. In order to perfect this, I spent a lot of time researching elements standard of this genre and comparing across examples. This was reflected in my Experiment 2 Genre Analysis, which was another essay I enjoyed producing and adding a creative twist to. I had a hunch that this would end up being the basis for my fully realized experiment with the amount of enthusiasm I had envisioning the final product. 

My last experiment was the most difficult for me to create. I was between ideas, and the quarantine had just started. I was overwhelmed by leaving college and switching to online schooling, causing my thoughts to be all over the place. I settled on experimenting with a photo essay documenting the Women’s Marches post the election of Donald Trump. The idea was interesting, and I researched examples of successful photo essays. While I was impressed by many of the pieces I found, I did not think this was a genre I could effectively carry out due to the limitations of my location and expertise.

Because of my experiences with each experiment, and going off of the aforementioned gut feeling, it was clear to me that I should pursue the educational Youtube video. One challenge I had to work around was my lack of technical skills regarding video creation and editing. I knew that I could create a successful script for the video, and discussed this hurdle with Jimmy. He advised me that a screenplay of sorts for my final project would be sufficient because of the given constraints.

I then had to decide how to best approach the tone of the script. I am passionately pro-choice and consider myself an activist for reproductive rights, but I wanted my screenplay to reach as wide of an audience as possible. Because of this, I opted to create an unbiased, purely informative tone when drafting the script by sticking to the facts of each case and refraining from expressing my opinions.  After creating my first draft, both my peers and Jimmy made me aware that certain sentence structures and word choices were unintentionally conveying my perspective on the issue. After receiving this criticism, I went back into the screenplay and altered sections to make the tone more neutral. The script may have a slight pro-choice undertone to it, but I think I combatted this component as best as I could. 

I am very pleased with the final product of my fully realized experiment entitled “More Than Just Roe: The Supreme Court and Reproductive Rights”. Maybe one day I’ll try to make it into an actual video. Overall, Writing 220 has been an extremely beneficial class for my professional and creative growth. It additionally enabled me to create numerous projects that I am proud of, making for a very rewarding process.