My writer's evolution essay looks at my development as a writer from before I began the minor and through my experiences within the minor. I discuss my formation as a writer and some of the major assignments and writing pieces that have affected my writing throughout college. 

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            How have I evolved as a writer? It’s always a tricky question. Evolving typically implies an improvement, a change that makes something better. So asking how I have evolved implies that I have improved. Not that I haven’t, it’s just often hard to assess yourself and admit that you’ve improved at something. People say that you are your own worst critic, and I definitely feel that way about myself. However, I have spent some time reflecting on the writing that I have done in college, especially as part of the Minor in Writing program, and I have found some improvements that I have made. Through this process of reflection, I have discovered almost two different types of a writer within me. I have the academic side of my writing, which has been honed through my classwork, and the more casual side of my writing, improved both through classwork and personal writing.

            While the academic side of my writing because long before college, I really began to realize how great it could be in my freshman year of college. That year I wrote two of my favorite essays, ones that still stick out in my mind now as a senior as ones that I’m proud of. That was when I knew that I wanted to continue pursuing writing. I actually had fun writing these essays and was proud of the work that I had done. That’s when I made the decision to apply to the Minor in Writing. The minor has ultimately pushed me to do much more writing than I would have done, which has resulted in the natural evolution of my writing skills.

            While many of the classes I have taken through the minor have focused on some of the more casual writing skills, as those are the more enjoyable things to write and, therefore, the more fun classes, I have worked on the more formal side of writing. Through my major in Communication Studies, I have had to write numerous academic essays in many of my different classes. These have ranged from legal analysis to media analysis and many other types of papers. To fulfill a Minor in Writing requirement, I took a Modern Greek upper level writing class focused on Athens past and present. We had to write multiple academic papers throughout the class, my favorite being an essay which required us to dissect and discuss the idea that "The Parthenon is always 'somewhere else.' If not entirely absent, it is never wholly present," something said by Mary Beard, an author that we read in the class. It took a great deal of thinking and discussion for me to begin to interpret this paradoxical statement. I believe that this became my favorite essay because it was my strongest and the one that truly shows of the improvements to my academic writing. After the thought and research that went into my argument, I felt confident that I had developed solid ideas and argued them well. I felt as if this class helped me to develop my academic argumentation skills. Although at this point I had written many academic papers for other classes, we rarely spend time actually refining these papers and my writing skills in these classes. The upper level writing class allowed me to write drafts and get feedback before continuing to make the paper better. While I usually do some revisions, the peer review and feedback from instructors helped me to understand what in my writing style was working and what needed to be worked on.

            I also took English 229, which focused on professional writing. I spent the semester refining my resume and cover letter writing skills, learning about how to write professional emails, updating my online presence with my new knowledge, and various other professional assignments. This was a good opportunity to see and practice professional sounding writing in a less academic sense. As someone who will most likely need to write professionally but not academically in my future career, it was a great opportunity to see how these skills could be applied to other types of writing. I felt like this was particularly beneficial as a senior hoping to enter the professional world next year. I had very little experience with any type of professional writing and this was a good way to prepare myself for these types of writing. It was great to feel like these academic skills that I have spent time improving for the purposes of academics aren’t just going to go to waste once I graduate and enter the professional world. I always knew that writing would be a part of my professional life in theory, but this was a great way to see how exactly it would be ingrained post-graduation.

            On the other side of my writing, I have spent a great deal of time working on my casual writing, from blogging to listicles to personal essays. Since I enjoy this casual writing much more, I definitely spent more time both personally and through my coursework on this side of my writing. This began with the Minor in Writing gateway course. This course taught me so much more about what writing can be and how to develop my writing and my writing process. I got to explore why I write and realized my love for the art of writing, the beauty that words can bring. While I am not sure that my writing was as artful as I thought it was, I enjoyed exploring different sides of writing and writing about topics that interested me. I wrote multiple blog posts through the Minor in Writing blog. These posts covered various topics, including my writing process. These posts consist of me talking about different pieces that I’m writing and throwing in pictures, GIFs, and occasionally links. In my writing assignments, I focused a lot on marching band, something that I’ve been involved in for a while now and a topic that I personally have found a great deal to write about, having written about different aspects of it in multiple writing classes. I played with a blog format for this piece and got used to the multimodal form of writing. There was still some learning to be done in order to use the blog format successfully, but it was a good start. I also remediated the piece into a Buzzfeed style listicle, which was definitely an interesting experience. It was strange to be turning in something that was purposely sarcastic and conversational, and it was definitely something with which I still needed to gain comfort.     

            The summer after my gateway class, I started my own blog that I called Pinterest to Reality in which I documented my attempts to recreate things I found on Pinterest (with varying success). While I ultimately failed at keeping this blog going and it is something that I hope to return to regularly someday when I may or may not have more free time after graduation, I definitely developed my blogging skills a little more through this project. The blog is much more casual than my academic writing and I write like I speak to my friends, using slang and very non-academic language. It was easier for me to work on these casual writing skills in this sense, writing for myself instead of for an assignment. Through this experience, I feel as if I have gained a firm grasp on how blogging works, the style that it affords and the different technological allowances it provides. From the blog posts I wrote in the gateway course to the personal blog I created, I feel as if I gained a much better usage of the multimodal function of blogging. I would often throw pictures or GIFs into my posts for no reason other than that I could. Now I am much more purposeful in my use of links and pictures, only adding them when it furthers my post and what I am trying to say. This definitely makes my blogs look and sound much better and makes them much more entertaining to read.     

            I took English 325 and Writing 200 at the same time after this. The biggest assignment in Writing 200 was a portfolio that encompassed a blog. I decided to create a scrapbook style portfolio that looked at my whole life before looking at my current life in the blog section. This allowed me to create a creative website that documented my life both past and present and allowed me to practice this more casual tone in a more academic sense. English 325 allowed me to practice the less academic writing in a different way. We worked on writing personal essays, focusing on events that have happened in our life and writing about them for a wider audience. Since the topic of my essays was my own life, it was something that was easy to write about in the sense that I knew the topic well. Instead, I was able to focus on how I wrote about my life, working on developing the style of my writing and drawing meaning out of my life experiences. It was interesting and useful to write more casually but still create a longer essay because it forced me to get further away from the academic style of writing. At that point, I was much better at not feeling like I had to be so formal and academic in writing that I was turning in. I was able to write about my life events in the way that they happened, with skillful, stylistic writing that was not academic sounding.

            I am currently taking my Communication Studies upper level writing class in addition to the Minor in Writing capstone. The upper level writing class is definitely pushing me further in my academic writing. It has been a while since I have written and revised a thesis statement, and it is pushing me to remember these revision skills. These are skills, however, that I have always worked on just for the purposes of academics. While I know that this writing ability will be useful in my professional career, some of the more nuanced academic skills, such as a perfect thesis statement, are things that I have only worked on because I wanted to do well academically. My casual writing, on the other hand, is something that I have worked on not just for academics, but because it is something that I really enjoy and want to be good at.

            While academic and casual writing have always been two different sides of who I am as a writer, I am currently trying something a little different. Through my Minor in Writing capstone project, I am attempting to merge the two sides. My goal is to create a capstone website that is rooted in academics and is clearly well-researched, but still sounds like me and has a slightly more casual feel to it than my usual academic writing. This has presented a unique challenge since it is not something that I am used to, but I am excited at the possibilities and the potential new skills that I hope to add to my writing thanks to this project.

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Annotated Bibliography

 

Lehman, Katherine. “Around the World and in Greece- the Parthenon.” February 2016.

 

This was an essay written for ModGreek 325, an Upper-Level Writing Requirement course outside of my major. We were tasked with dissecting the quote "The Parthenon is always 'somewhere else.' If not entirely absent, it is never wholly present," said by Mary Beard, a Greek scholar. This seemingly paradoxical statement vexed me at first, but I ultimately argued that the Parthenon has significant meaning to the Greeks and to the rest of the world and that these meanings could not exist without each other. To me personally, this essay represents a significant improvement in my academic and analytical writing. After working closely with my GSI for the class, I feel that I not only had a strong argument, but I successfully made that argument through strong writing.

 

Lehman, Katherine. “Corruption of Student Morals.” May 2013.

 

“Corruption of Student Morals” was an essay written for my Directed Self-Placement assignment to be placed into a first year writing class before entering college. The topic had to do with cheating, and I argued that cheating had become a social norm within the teenage subculture, and people were frowned upon for not cheating. While this was and still is an interesting idea, I could have done much more research and it is pretty poorly written. The main ideas and points seem solid, but the research behind them could be stronger. The writing itself is not the worst thing ever, but I definitely could have done a much better job if I were writing it today.  

 

Lehman, Katherine. “Encyclopedia Entries.” March 2017.

 

As part of my Communication Studies Upper-Level Writing class, I had to write encyclopedia entries for a number of terms off of an approved list. These terms had to include key words and an in depth description of the word in a short amount of space. This was interesting because it was a new kind of assignment than I had ever had to do before. It was difficult to fit the amount of information needed in such a short amount of space, but I feel that I ended up doing so successfully. I do not necessarily have a career writing encyclopedia entries, but I feel that I ultimately did them justice.

 

Lehman, Katherine. “For Maisie.” November 2015.

 

“For Maisie” is a personal essay that I wrote for English 325. We were given a list of prompts but could also write about just about anything. I already had this idea in mind before we were given the prompts, but fit it in with a prompt about the idea of regret. The essay is about a girl that I knew in high school who passed away our senior year. I was in a similar friend circle with her, but she and I were never close, and it followed my feelings of regret for not knowing her better and feeling like an imposter mourning her with everyone who was closer. Writing-wise, I played with a few new writing techniques to give the essay the feel that I wanted. For example, I split the writing with breaks in between events, and each section got gradually shorter and shorter as I thought about her less and less. While I enjoyed playing with the technique, I’m not sure that what I was doing came across as well as I would have liked.

 

Lehman, Katherine. “Has Family Changed?” April 2014.

 

My essay entitled “Has Family Changed?” was written for my First-Year Writing Requirement class. We were tasked to write about nostalgia, but given no other guidelines as far as topic goes. I ended up deciding to look at conservatives and their aversion to marriage equality as a nostalgia for the idea of the 1950s and the nuclear family. I argued, however, that the nuclear family never really existed, so their nostalgia is actually false. While this was written early on in my academic career and, therefore, is not the greatest writing stylistically, it is something that I am proud of for the content. I did a great deal of research going into this piece and the research pays off. It is a little immature in the formatting of a persuasive paper in that it focuses on my argument, refutes the other side, then concludes, but it has a solid base.

 

Lehman, Katherine. “Herta Herzog and Media Audiences.” February 2017.

 

I wrote this paper for my Communication Studies Upper-Level Writing Requirement course. We were assigned to explain how Herta Herzog made essential advancements in the field of Communication Studies. I ultimately argued that she was one of the creators and first users of Uses and Gratifications theory, a theory that is now imperative to the field. Within the main argument, I also tied in how under-appreciated Herzog was in her time, just because she was a female academic. While this was a very narrow topic that did not allow for much creativity, I do feel proud of my work because I went above and beyond, doing unnecessary outside research to prove my point.

 

Lehman, Katherine. “LEGO and Starbucks: Online Brand Communities.” December 2016.

 

For my Communication Studies capstone class, we all had to do our own research regarding networks and write about it. I ended up studying brand communities, or communities online who all center around one brand and discussions about the brand, focusing on two main communities: LEGO and Starbucks. While I had done the research, I did not end up being as interested in the topic as I thought I was at the beginning, so it ended up being a struggle to write the essay portion. I struggled to get motivated to write it, but I do feel like the writing itself ended up being good quality.

 

Lehman, Katherine. Pinterest to Reality. June 2015-January 2017.

 

Pinterest to Reality is a personal blog that I started in the summer of 2015. The focus is to take pins from Pinterest and talk about my attempts to turn those pins into a reality. I have multiple different categories, such as style, DIY, beauty, recipes, and miscellaneous. The blog is a fun way for me to show my creative side while still allowing for things to fail. As far as writing goes, it is a great chance for me to express my creative side in writing. The style is incredibly casual, which allows for my voice to really come through. I try to write like I am speaking directly to the people reading it as opposed to formally writing to them.

 

Lehman, Katherine. “Repurposing Inspiration,” “The Drafting Process,” and “Reworking my Repurposing.” February-March 2015.

 

These three blog posts, written during my time in the Gateway to the Minor in Writing course, follow my journey through writing my repurposing assignment. The first blog post went through the process of discussing ideas with a partner to decide what to write for the repurposing project. The second post talked about the drafting process and how I got started when I was not sure where to start. The third post discussed a new direction for the project, that was very similar but much more direct and clear as opposed to a vague idea. These posts were good but lacked some of the elements that blogs afford. I wrote like a normal essay instead of using the multimodal features that blogs allow for.

 

Lehman, Katherine. “Response to Jim Rome: Marching Band Stereotypes.” March 2015.

 

This was a blog post style piece of writing created for Writing 220, the gateway to the Minor in Writing course. I wrote this for my repurposing project, taking a creative piece I had written about marching band and turning it into an argument against people who think marching bands are useless and think about marching band stereotypes. Since it was a blog post, this piece involved a great deal of images, links, videos, and any other media I could fit into it. While I do feel like I argued my point well, I think the blog is a little too overrun with media. I got a little too involved and overly excited in the post and the media I was adding and put in way too much. The media ends up overpowering the argument I was trying to make.