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Evolution Essay_   

      My journey through writing during my time at the university has been interesting.  I started in the school of engineering where writing is not exactly the main focus of study or stressed as much as it should.  I made the switch to LSA at the end of my sophomore year, which is when I had to take my first writing course.  Looking back at my writing I have done since taking my first class has made me realize there has been a theme of what I write about in my papers, language.  I know it seems like an obvious theme, because of the fact I am a linguistics major and writing minor; however, I have pulled the themes of language into assignments before ever taking a linguistics course. I have also drawn them into courses that have nothing to do with language.  Throughout my writing, the theme has had many different forms nevertheless; it has still kept an arching theme.  

      Having an arching theme of language is evident from the beginning of my writing after making the switch over to LSA and taking the freshman English 125 course.  Taking a look back at my writing from just a couple years back I can see my writing has progressed a fair amount.  I picked out my essay on a short story we read in class was called Homeplace, because I did an analysis of why I thought the author may have done certain things in his writing, such as asking rhetorical questions and why he may have written in the way he did.  I thought it was interesting I decided to do this kind of paper, even though I did not have any experience with doing that kind of writing or had no large interest in understand language in this type of way.  It was interesting to me I had this type of paper before I had even considered doing linguistics as a major or taking any classes discussing similar topics to analyzing discourse.  Writing this paper allowed me to get a taste of what it is like to critically analyze why writers make decisions and made me think about my writing more.  In this piece of work I attempted to make my own rhetorical decisions I thought would be help for expressing my argument.  As a writer who did not have much writing experience at the college level I decided to use the rhetorical choices I knew about, such as using a fair amount of examples in my paper.

      Discourse analysis was a subject that I enjoyed exploring while writing.  In my English 225 class we did two papers about discourse analysis, where we had to analyze the writing styles of a university concentration we were interested in.  We did this by analyzing journal articles from our concentration that we chose to investigate. Breaking down each aspect of how linguist write was interesting because it gave me a fair amount of insight into what linguistics was all about.  Writing about how people write in linguistics I actually believe is part of why I chose linguistics as a major.  Learning how people write within linguistics made me understand more about linguistics, such as, how research is done, what topics are learned about, and how topics are talked about.  I think learning about the features of linguistics writing helped me to make a more informed decision about my major.  The way this class and more specifically the two papers I had to write helped me grow as a writer is because of the way it made me think about the academic writing I would be expected to do. I believe analyzing how linguist write journal articles made me a stronger writer in the linguistic program even before taking a writing course in linguistics. 

      Understanding how linguist write helped me to understand myself as a writer when I started to write within my major in my first upper level writing class in phonetics. Our term paper for this course was set up just like the journal articles that I analyzed in my English 225 course, so understanding how those were put together helped me considerably to understand what was expect and how the paper should be formatted and written.  This was a paper that allowed me to pull in skills that I had learned while a student in engineering, because I had to pull information out of data sets that I had, which was something I had not had to do since leaving the school of engineering.  The data set that I was investigating for my paper was data involving men’s and women’s names and how certain names are gendered based on features within the names.  It was nice to learn from experience with the paper how that skill could transfer over into my new major and allow me to draw conclusions based on data similar to my engineering classes.  

      Knowing how I write in my major was a useful thing to understand and utilize, but was very different than how I had to think about writing for my gateway course.  In my gateway course I got to explore two different types of writing that I had never done, repurposing and remediation. These two types of writing were interesting for me because I had never done anything like them and they challenged me.  My repurposing paper was a paper that I repurposed for a previous paper that I had written in my classic civilizations class, which was written about Runic letters and their ancient uses.  Repurposing this paper was stimulating because it allowed me to look back at the information I had learned from initially writing the paper and expanding on it.  In order to repurpose this topic I had to make it similar, but different, so I decided to continue to write about how Runes were used, but in a more modern context.  Writing by changing just one small variable was intriguing because I got to look at various ways that uses had transformed over hundreds of years.  It gave me a snapshot of how the letters had progressed into a modern age, yet they were being used in similar way as they had always been used.  My remediation project allowed me to take what I had learned and repurposed and put it into a new form of media that would allow me to make my argument more clear and present it in a more attention-grabbing way.   My remediation project I made a website to present the material I had learned in the repurposing paper, which allowed me to show picture and descriptions of those pictures to make a more visually based argument.  Being able to have the visual aspect to the project was a helpful affordance for my argument because it allowed me to clarify my argument through images, instead of descriptions.  My remediation project taught me to look at writing in a different light other than just thinking about it as a written essay, which would take the reader from point A to point B, but more as just a means of relaying information in any kind of way that I want to.  Looking at writing in this viewpoint has helped me to think of it last as a boring essay, because I realized I could do more with it if I can draw from the advantages of new media. 

      I have not been able to take advantage of new media in writing for my other classes not in the minor in writing, because they are still stuck in the essay format rut.  The essay format still has not kept me from writing about language though.  For my political science 386 class, tying culture and sports together for a paper, I still managed to pull in language influence even though the class was about sports.  While writing the paper I realized how I could integrate the topics I learned about language and tie them into so many arguments.  I did this in my paper by pulling in topics that I had learned from sociolinguists and how shared networks can help develop common language between groups and group identity. The challenging part about doing the paper was trying to use the required readings and the necessary format.  The strange aspect for the paper was the way we had to begin; with an outline format I had never seen, including the sources you were going to use and quotes.  Writing my paper in this form was strange for me, but I think helped me developed as a writer because I now use outlines because of this.  It made me realized if I lay out what I’m going to write before I start the paper, I draft a better paper.  My paper was not the only assignment I drew language into my writing in my political science class, I also brought language into my final exam essay.  Without a question I picked the language prompt because I knew I would write without a problem because it has become a part of my writing.             

      Looking over my writing throughout my time in college has influence the way I look at my capstone project considerably.  Reviewing my past work work actually helped influence me to changing my project to what it is now.  It made me realize that I wanted to tie language more into my project to make it more interesting and exciting for me, not only so that I would enjoy it more, but so that it was a better project.  In my process of working on my capstone project I analyze the choices that advertiser made and why those can be bad for the people that consume the information from their advertisements when they are made the way that they are.  While working on my project I started with a more traditional writing form, by when advised by T to make it more interesting I changed to having videos.  Working on this I learned that making good choices about topic because that can drive how interested and engaged in the writing I would be.

      Through my college writing career I have tended to write about what I am interested in and that is how language works, in every facet.  I have learned about how I like to write, develop my ideas, and look at different aspects throughout language.  I have learned that I enjoy writing about language and that it comes natural to me to write about it.  

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