Adding My Voice to the Writing Process
Over the course of the semester, I have adapted my writing to include myself. That sounds completely crazy I know. While I did not really pick up the five paragraph essay in high school, I was taught to back everything with evidence. An opinion can sometimes become a fact when there’s evidence to support it. My thesis might have started out a projection of my thoughts but by the end of the paper it was just a collage of textual evidence. This semester I learned to keep my voice present in the work without it over shrouding the evidence. In other words, I learned to find balance between my thoughts and the things I can prove. I took this approach usually by including things I liked into the post.
My favorite posts where the ones about some form of black excellence or the degradation of it. I get very passionate about ensuring that African Americans are given credit when they get the better of the stereotypes and obstacles set up to suppress them. These posts received the most and longest comments. Sometimes these posts received comments from people who would not have participated in a class conversation if the topic came up. That was encouraging because their willingness to state their opinion on my post means that I approached the topic in a way that made people comfortable. Making the post a safe space for our community, was not at the expense of my point getting across which made the post stronger.
Looking back, some of my better posts were ones I redid. Whether that was me completely starting over or only having to start over on an outline, I did better when I started fresh. This is another instance where the statement “If you haven’t learned something in the course of writing, you probably don’t have much to teach us,” rings true. Just like my final booklet, redoing certain posts taught me that sometimes it takes doing something a second or third time to create gold. I really stand by the idea that “if you do not experience frustration, then you won’t have the opportunity to learn through resolving the problem.” You are not in a position to learn if you are perfect. Failure is the best teacher when it comes to writing.
I did learn that I have go to phrases and preferred sentence structures. I use sentences that I can use “;however,” set up more often than I probably should. My favorite way to extend a post was “in other words.” There were scenarios where that was actually helpful but sometimes it was not necessary.
In the later posts, I noticed there were fewer fillers because I was focused on quality content and not meeting the word limit. Prior to this semester, I definitely would have stretched every assignment to meet the word limit. I did this because if I use all the words allotted, then a professor would not be able to say that I did at least try to include everything. Sometimes if you do not use all the words, it is assumed that you rushed or that it is not as high quality.
My posts sometimes had a creative touch. For example, Mo Money is a song by J. Cole that I used to come up with the title of my multimedia post. I think the posts that were on topics that I liked to bring up in conversation were the easiest to write. The favorite poem post was easy because I just really love Langston Hughes, which helped me appreciate the poem even more.
Overall, the more recent posts are more interesting to read. I did not put any more or less effort into them but I did have a slightly different approach. When I stopped stifling my voice, my posts began to flow and the message was clearer. I also found it helpful to go into each post with a concise mindset. If I knew I wanted to get my point across in the fewest amount of words beforehand, then I usually avoided typical fluff. Being concise eventually became a subconscious thing, which is great because that is more time efficient and in general more effective.
Work Cited:
Me
Churchill, Suzanne. “Post Specifications – Media & Community.” Media Community. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 May 2017.
