My name is Clare Hudock, and I am a third-year economics student at the University of Michigan. This blog is a collection of three essays done throughout the semester for the Gateway course in the Sweetland Minor in Writing. Throughout the course and through these assignments, I discovered a lot about myself as a writer, and explored aspects of my own writing that I had never thought about before.
For the Repurposed assignment, I took a research paper that I had done in a public health course on health disparities and repurposed it into something else. This ended up being a more thoughtful and arduous task than I had expected. I thought the original research paper that I did was on such an interesting topic, but the paper itself was not interesting. The research paper did not do the topic justice, and I wanted to make it more personal and focused. I think one of the most important lessons I learned when writing this Repurposed assignment was to be honest with myself about my audience. Originally, I thought I would turn a dry research paper into something juicy and relatable—something people would passively share around Facebook. I wanted it to be an easy and fun read that also had a serious and real message. I thought if I made it relatable, it would change more minds and appeal to a wider audience. So, I wrote a paper about health disparities that referenced movies, TV shows, and other pop culture icons. It was awful. I realized, I am not involved enough in pop culture for an essay like that. More importantly, I was misinterpreting what “relatable” was. I had to ask myself, what am I actually interested in about this topic? Is there an audience that is also interested in this? I realized what I am most interested in is convincing people why health disparities matter in the scheme of things. I could only convince people why it matters if I provided a genuine reason for why I think it matters. Once I accepted my own goals, and was honest about what audience I can write to, my piece came together much more nicely.
The Repurposing essay specifically challenged me to own my opinion. It is so engrained in me to not offer a personal opinion in my formal writing, that it felt wrong to do so. I would write a sentence that started with “I believe,” and thought, “Who are you to tell people what you believe?” It felt aggressive, and I thought people would disagree with me (as if that’s a bad thing). Eventually, I started having fun with it and just typing out whatever I thought and really believed. I digressed and made bold statements. It was empowering. When I decided to show my first draft to Ray, my instructor, I thought he was going to think I was crazy and had radical opinions. It is an uncomfortable feeling at first to write something personal—and I think opinions and ideologies are personal—and then to share that writing. However, this piece was personally transformative for me because I dabbled in opinion writing. I discovered putting opinions to paper is a sort of power. Whether or not someone reads it, the writer’s perspective on the world is asserted. It’s not an unwelcome form of aggression.
My initial goal of turning a complicated issue into something easy to read and relatable materialized in my Remediation. I wrote about how pathways link poverty to health outcomes in my Repurposing paper. One of these pathways was built environment. I thought, I wanted to show that visually—and the best way to show built environment is on a map. I chose two Michigan cities that I am familiar with to compare: Detroit and Bloomfield Township. I thought the differences in the map would be stark, but I found that not everything can be seen on a map. This ended up being challenging, because things that matter in built environment like sidewalks, park quality and safety do not necessarily show up on a map. I wanted to simply provide the maps and statistics, and let the audience decide for themselves what to think. However, I felt the project needed more narration in order to tell the story I was aiming for. Therefore, I made an infographic with some text, some images, and some statistics. The design choices were challenging for me, because I am not a graphic designer. Piktochart—the website I used to create the infographic was helpful, but I still feel like the design is not where I would like it. Also, it was difficult to balance the amount of narration and the amount of room for interpretation to give. As I said, I wanted the readers to interpret the information for themselves, but I am not sure I gave enough information for them to interpret the proper story. I think the maps did not provide as much information as I would have hoped, and I am not sure I handled the information sharing very well.
As I finished up these two assignments, and the term came to a close, I began reflecting on who I was as a writer and where I was in my writing career. The “Why I Write” assignment turned out to be a meaningful and informative assignment. I wrote it almost in stream-of-conscious, like I was telling a story to myself. As I wrote about what I thought of my own writing, I realized I had become more comfortable writing throughout the semester. Somehow, during Gateway I began to take pride in my writing and desired to produce high-quality work for more than a class grade. It was challenging in the beginning of the semester, and I thought I was not a good fit for the Writing Minor. However, throughout this class I gained more confidence in my writing and enjoyed the process much more. I am now looking forward to Capstone, while before I dreaded it. The “Why I Write” essay is what marked my realization of this transformation, and solidified it for me. After I finished that essay, I felt like I knew where I stood with my relationship with writing and was confident in my ability to move forward.