Post Conference Thoughts

I don't have much experience with auto-ethnography, but my understanding is that I will use my research to  expand upon and challenge my ideas. My main goal for this project is to really question myself, and all of my ideas following school in Kentucky. I am obviously very opinionated about culture and life in Kentucky, but after all the writing I have completed on the topic, I want to challenge my opinions. At the end of the day I hope to find some validity to my opinions, and I want to challenge this validity by speaking with other students from Orange County, and seeing where their heads are at, and if they have had similar experiences as I. If they have, then  I can use my experiences and their responses as evidence for what life is like for a person from Orange County in Lexington. I like the idea of shifting my focus a touch as to avoid any generalizations that are without merit. It is difficult to say everyone from a particular area is one certain way, while I may feel something, other people in my situation may feel differently and I am excited to figure out if that is true or not.

I am looking forward to getting IRB approval so I can get started on my research. After each interview, I will journal about things we had in common or not in common and keep a thorough record of my thoughts throughout the research process on top of continuing my past writing. I will also be having my weekly meeting with Dr. Soulis on Tuesday to discuss the direction of the project. I am excited to  see where this project can go.

Writing is a Passion

Today's society focuses so much on the academic side of writing. So many people grow up believing they are bad writers because they didn't do well in English class, or don't allow themselves to grow as writers because they lean more towards math or science skill sets.

People tend to forget that there are a variety of reasons to write. Hooks and Anzaldua wrote for different reasons, but at the end of the day, they both write because it is their passion. They write because, at the end of the day, they have stories to tell. Humans all have their own stories to tell, and one of the best ways to tell that story is to write it down and get your emotions out on paper.

Just like Hooks and Anzaldua, I fell in love with writing at a young age. I too would stay awake under the covers with a flashlight reading autobiographies because I loved to transport myself into the world and life of the writer. I fell in love with the art of telling a story.

It is a funny thought that something I fell in love with so long ago, plays such a vital role in my adult life. Not only do I want to pursue journalism and writing as a career, but I am using my life experiences to try to make sense of my own story for my senior seminar project.

I am thinking about writing an autoethnography about culture shock for my senior thesis. It is perplexing because I want to write something of value, and I want my story to matter to the people who read about my college experience in the south. However, just as Anzaldua wrote what was in her heart, and told her story, I must do the same. All I need to do is write what is in my heart and draw from my life in order to give my opinions and emotions validity. At the same time, I must write for myself, and not just for my audience. I want this project to tell my story, and the only way to do that is to be completely honest with myself as I am writing.

Audience reflects Voice

I am the type of writer who likes to pretend that I write for myself, and my thoughts are independent of any filter or bias created by my audience. However, I would be lying if I said that anything I wrote for the public eye had the same voice of my private journal. The truth of the matter is, if a writer is writing for their work to be read by other people, their writing is going to be shifted in order to appease that particular audience. The writer can write on the same topic multiple times for multiple different audiences and the piece is going to differ according to who the writer was writing for.

I love my personal journal, and my writing in my journal encompasses my most raw, personal and private thoughts, and it is in those thoughts that allowed me to fall in love with writing in the first place. I wish that audience didn't play a role in the work that the writer creates, but it is a consequence of the society we live in.

I have done a lot of thinking about audience and the audience's perception of work as it pertains to my Senior Seminar project. Throughout my years at Transy, my writing has been driven by my emotions and experiences deriving from my drastic culture shock coming from Southern California, to a very southern culture in Kentucky. I have written about my feelings a lot in multiple different contexts, and each work differed from one another because I wrote it with a different audience in mind. My very first piece was a blog post on my personal blog that I felt no one read. However, to my surprise it actually got a lot of reads and I had said things in my post that I believed but didn't want my peers to know. I would have written that blog post a lot differently had I known it would have been read as widely as it was.

I built upon that post, and wrote an OP-ED piece in the Transylvania Newspaper a year later. This time, I attempted to write in a much more dignified manner and backed up my claims with examples to give my experiences relevance to the reader. I wrote it thinking about the readers this time. My audience was similar, but I had another year of experience under my belt and this time, I was prepared for my opinions to be read. This experience created a very filtered version of the same opinions I had already written about.

I compare these two articles and I can see a difference in my voice. I feel like I played it safe in the Rambler article because I was aware of the audience backlash of disagreeing with my opinion. When it comes to audience, for me, I think it is something we need to strive to work beyond. I want to write a strong, compelling argument for something, and not worry about the repercussions. I don't want my audience to filter my writing. I want an audience to develop a conversation about a piece of writing, as that is their purpose to begin with, but a writer needs to keep in mind that good conversation from the audience only occurs if the writer is genuine with their thoughts and doesn't play it safe for the audience's sake.

Questioning my judgment for Topic choices

I am in awe of the wide variety of projects that were created in past senior seminars. To be totally honest, it is a little daunting. I loved all of the projects and they all seemed to answer such important questions and looked into such complex topics. All of their topics were very innovative and I am honestly not sure how they came up with their ideas. I need some serious help brainstorming in order to get to the point of establishing such a concrete topic for my project. I especially enjoyed the project about international students on campus. I think it came from an interesting perspective and enjoyed the experts of the international students writing throughout the project.

Coming into this class I had a few ideas of what I wanted to focus on, but it was nothing concrete. After reading and looking at the projects and ideas of past students, I feel very unprepared. Their projects were so specific and narrowed down to a particular point. My ideas seem way too broad to even consider, nor do I know how to exactly narrow them down to a specific point that would make the idea eligible for a senior seminar project.

While I am still pretty lost on my topic, I did realize the types of projects I did not want to pursue. My largest revelation from viewing other projects is that I learned which kinds of projects I did not want to pursue as it pertains to medium. While I enjoyed some of the typical research papers, I think I want to explore a different medium for my project. I won’t exactly know how I want to present my project until I narrow down my topic ideas and see which medium works for which project, but I think I want to try something multimodal.

My most pertinent question at the moment is figuring out how to narrow down my ideas into a single concrete topic. Looking back at past projects I have done during my time at Transy, my favorites were based on topics I cared very strongly about. My top two include my research project into John F Kennedy and how I believe he would be a republican if he were alive today, and second, a case study into the stereotypes revolving around Orange County women and how they are misjudged because of the extreme media misconceptions. While both of these topics can be pushed further, I think I want to pursue different questions within the same genre of ideas. So while I have narrowed my thought process down to either California or Political based questions, my main concern right now is figuring out the question I want to research, and what opinions I want to express in my project.

The Ability to Argue Spurs my Writing

Senior Seminar Blog Post 1

As I look back at my favorite projects throughout by Transy writing career, I find that the projects I was more emotionally involved in, turned out to be more successful. I am a very opinionated person, and my favorite way to share my opinion is via writing and using rhetoric to craft my point perfectly. In addition to projects that I felt very fondly and passionately towards, I also find that my best works revolve around very controversial topics. I suppose I like to stir the pot a tad, but I look at it as sparking a conversation with my opinion. That is ultimately my goal for my senior seminar project.

When I eventually narrow down my ideas and decide on a topic for my project, I want it to be something I am passionate about, and something that is controversial enough to spur some very interesting dialogue. I love when people disagree with what I have written because it challenges me to defend what I believe, and also challenges me to base my opinions on valid arguments. I think it only makes my writing stronger, and I love the conversation and debate that result of a controversial piece.

One of my all time favorite works was actually the project I did for my freshman research seminar with Tim Soulis. Tim and I always have great political conversation because we usually disagree on everything. I decided to focus on politics for my FYRS project because I wanted to see if I could make Tim agree with my opinion, even though we fall on different sides of the aisle. It was an amazing learning experience and was my first taste of producing quality argument driven work. 

As I stated before, my best pieces in my opinion are extremely argument driven, and I enjoy the conversation that follows. For my writerly portfolio, I plan to convene all of these pieces that were the most successful in their argument, and showed progression of my abilities to create an argument throughout my writing career. I plan to use my FRYS research paper, a blog post about southern culture I also wrote in my first year, Rambler OP Ed pieces, and other essays and projects that I feel best display my ability to present an argument, and show that my abilities have progressed throughout my time at Transy.