WHO AM I AS A WRITER?
My journey as a writer: it all started with my mom giving me my first journal on my ninth birthday. It had pink, red, blue, and orange muted stripes on the front. I remember looking at my mom, asking her if I should use it for school. Her response was, “You could. Or you could use it to write about your day, about your life, about your feelings. You can use it however you like. I always liked having one around as a kid in case I needed it.” When she said that, I looked at her, puzzled and confused. Feelings? My life? My day? What would I have to write about? Why would I need it? That little journal sat collecting dust in my white side-table, between my two twin beds, for months. It was forgotten – until one specific day brought it to life. What happened on that day? Well, I got into a fight with my brother.
What the fight was about, I cannot remember – but I remember how I felt. I sprinted up to my room, distraught and hurt, slammed the door, and curled up on my beige, polyester rug. I was so angry but did not know how to let it out. In that moment, I remembered the muted-colored, striped journal. My mom’s voice played over and over in my head. “Marie, you could use it to write about anything.” I dove into that white side table, finding it hidden between my favorite Junie B. Jones book and my pencil pouch from the previous school year. And I wrote. I wrote for about four hours that day. I wrote about the argument. I wrote about how it made me feel. I wrote about what I was going to do about it. I wrote about the struggles I had been having with friends at school. I wrote about my love for the movie High School Musical and my confusion surrounding whether or not I wanted to quit gymnastics. I wrote about my love for pasta, but only with the sauce on the side and I tried to figure out why I liked it on the side, but I didn’t reach a conclusion, I just liked it. I wrote about everything. Before I knew it, my one hour time-out that afternoon had been three hours overdue, and my right hand had calluses forming from my sparkly pink pen. This is when my journey began.
My journaling continued throughout elementary school, middle school, high school, and even college – traveling as my built-in therapist and best friend if I needed one. That voice that I had on the day my brother and I got in a fight is entirely unrecognizable today, though. I have grown through developmental stages of my life, just as much as I have matured as a writer. My growth as a writer can be attributed to my own maturity; however, this growth could not have happened without the help of guidance through the classroom, dating back to the fourth-grade composition.
In Massachusetts, we have statewide exams called the MCAS, which are meant to measure student growth. In the fourth grade, the MCAS includes a composition section, meant to measure student writing development for Massachusetts schools. This composition was something I dreaded since the second grade because I thought I was a terrible academic writer. My journaling was something that did not translate to the expected standardized formatting of the MCAS. My brain was also excellent at timetables and science projects, but I thought I could not write academically. We had done practice compositions in class, writing about our favorite books we had read, and the themes that each book spoke to – but I hated it. By the time MCAS day came around, I had memorized exactly how my teacher wanted me to write, and how to get the high score – but that final score I got was reflective of my memorizing skills as opposed to my writing skills.
This sort of formulaic writing style I had developed continued throughout middle school when I learned about the five-paragraph essay. The dreaded five-paragraph essay: a formula for my own downfall as a young teenage writer. On the first day of the seventh grade, I was handed a diagram of a cheeseburger. The bun represented my introduction and my conclusion: the means of holding together the “meat” of the essay. The meat was a symbol of the concrete ideas that supported my thesis –and the toppings like the lettuce, cheese and tomatoes, were reflective of the supportive details that backed up my ideas. This metaphor was made to be relatable, and meant to make writing fun for seventh graders. But again, I was met with frustration and confusion: one frustration being, I was a vegetarian and had never eaten a cheeseburger before and two – I ended up being too focused on making sure my cheeseburger was structurally perfect, inevitably leading to a shortage of content in my papers. Each paper had an introduction that began broad and ended specific with a thesis; three supporting paragraphs, each including one quote in the middle to support the point being made; and ended with a conclusion, restating my thesis as the first sentence and ending with broad claims. The structure provided nothing but a jab at my confidence in my writing abilities and a wall I put up between me and academic writing.
The five-paragraph essay haunted me throughout high school, turning me away from all possible English and history courses that required academic writing. I buried myself in physics and calculus problems, digging a hole big enough to hide from the potential of having to write beyond sophomore year of high school. I came to Wake Forest, hoping to continue to dig that hole and hide from academic writing at all possible costs, but our mandatory FYS and WRI 111 courses forced me to stop digging and jump in.
On the first day of my freshman year writing seminar, my professor told us to squash the idea of the five-paragraph essay, and to never look back at that structure again. I stared at her, wide-eyed and confused. What was academic writing without the five-paragraph essay? Have I been taught writing incorrectly my entire life? Do I not know anything? My emotions leaving that classroom that day were all over – ranging from relief that I never had to do another five-paragraph essay, to fear that I was going to fail out of college because I didn’t know how to write anything but a five-paragraph essay. This fear disappeared soon after day one, when I realized some of the skills I had learned in my previous English and writing courses were valuable, but the structure that I had always struggled with was something I could put behind me.
WRI 111 is when I started to learn how to write. I wrote about things that were personal to me, like my idea of home. I wrote an analytical reflection to a documentary that was interesting to me. I learned what an autoethnography was, and wrote one. And most importantly, I learned that I loved to write. Rather than dreading having to take a writing course, I was excited to show up to class each day to learn about a new form of writing and show off the skills that I had acquired in my peer editing sessions. This class alone, taught by Professor Laura Giovanelli, encouraged me to embark on the journey of my writing minor, here at Wake Forest: a journey and decision that I am so grateful for, because now I have the utmost confidence in my voice as a writer.
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As a senior reflecting back on who I am as a writer, it is challenging to put into one, concrete, statement. I am an economics major and writing minor here at Wake, meaning I have exercised many forms of writing. I have acquired different skills for specific audiences, niche techniques for various genres, and made a name for myself in certain discourse communities. All of these accomplishments have developed my flexible voice that changes depending on who I am writing to and what I am trying to accomplish. The audiences that I primarily write for vary from economics professors, seeking no personalization of writing pieces and concrete evidence presented with an unbiased voice; writing professors, who are looking for a unique voice that expresses my opinions and internal thoughts; and myself, who introspectively seeks my own personal truth through freewriting. Those three audiences have sub-audiences in them, depending on the specific professor’s expectations. These professor’s expectations, I have learned, come from genre expectations specific to the assignment; discourse community expectations, specific to the other experts in the field; and personal expectations, specific to their own style.
Learning to write for different courses and professors here at Wake Forest has been a series of trial and error. Different professors have more narrow expectations in style and content, forcing me to adapt my voice in ways that I have to push myself. At times, I have faced failure in meeting those expectations, but I learn from those mistakes and grow with the next piece I have to write. All of these mistakes come with feedback that allow me to have a deeper understanding of the expectations that I need to adapt for, to fit the communities I am writing to. Growing up, I viewed failure as discouraging and something I cannot grow from. That definition has changed through learning to write and seeing that failure only leads to growth and development. Failure I now view as the key element to shaping my voice in writing.
So, who am I as a writer? That depends on who I am writing to and what I am writing for. I am a writer confident in my ability to adapt to different discourse communities, genres, and audiences. I am a writer who has acquired a set of skills, flexible and adaptable to different expectations. I am a writer whose voice has not stopped growing and maturing since that little nine-year-old girl hit her pink sparkly pen to paper. I will continue to grow as a writer and develop my voice as a writer through my career and through my continuous journaling. The next chapter of my life beyond school will introduce me to a whole new set of genres I need to learn to write to, and discourse communities I will need to fit into; but the backbone of skills I have acquired along the way up until this point, will ease that transition. I am excited to fail, to grow from those failures, and to continue to grow as a writer beyond an academic setting.
My portfolio is a reflection of all different types of writing I have done here at Wake Forest, academic and personal. Rather than follow a linear format of specific developmental classes, the pieces that I have chosen are intended to show how different my voice is for different courses. Rather than base my growth according to a timeline, I want to show my growth through adaptability for different discourse communities, genres, and audiences. Looking back on all that I have done, I feel as though that is most reflective of who I am as a writer, and what has shaped me to be the writer I am today.