WRITING to INFORM

                When I was young, I always thought I would want to become a teacher when I grew up. As children, we spend the majority of our time with either our family, friends, or teachers – and I doubt I would be far off the point if I were to say most of us thought we wanted to teach at some point. While I gave up the idea of teaching as a career path long ago – I’ve decided I would be a terrible professor – my recent experiences with academic and professional writing have brought this desire to explain and discuss back to the forefront of my mind when thinking about my writing in general.

 

                As often is the case with academic writing, the majority of my writing for college and high school includes some form of argumentation or explanation of topics learned about in class. These kinds of papers tend to not leave much wiggle room as far as creativity goes – the teacher gives the student a prompt, guidelines, or a grading rubric, and then the student follows these instructions to the best of their ability. While these papers offered me a chance to improve my essay writing skills, the topics of discussion were not always the most interesting; I was teaching concepts through my writing, but not concepts I was passionate about.

 

                Now, not all academic writing left me feeling trapped within rubrics – in my more recent academic career and college writing, I feel as though I have been given a much greater choice about how I write. When given a choice, it seems that my writing transforms itself; it changes from just an exercise in essay writing or reciting what I’ve learned to something more focused on a more personal kind of discussion and explanation of topics that I hold dear. This is where I’ve discovered that I find the most joy in my writing, and it makes me think back to my prior desire to teach, and perhaps how it has changed over the years.

 

                Of course academic writing has been a major influence on my writing style and motivations, yet it is only recently with the experience of writing freely for online publications that I have truly found the theme behind my writing when I am given a choice. After writing for a college news site – Uloop News – for a year, it became clear to me that I had the most fun when I was able to write about topics that I find interesting – ones that I find that I want to share with others. While these subjects range from gamer culture to online communities to the representation of women in media, they are all topics that I feel personally attached to and affected by. A few of my articles actually sparked some thoughtful discussions when I shared them around social media.

 

                When I write about any of these things, I write in a way that organizes the most information in the clearest way possible, in order to explain the topics I care about to those that may not know much about them. In a way, the writing that gives me a choice, I use to teach – and those pieces are the pieces of writing that I am most proud of, whether they are academic or otherwise.  The pieces that I feel best exemplify this desire to inform will be featured here; it is my hope that they will teach my readers something new or give a different perspective on the issues I find the most important.