Sarah Rybak

Starting out my college career, I never really thought of myself as a writer. I knew I could write well – I had always gotten A’s in English classes, and I was very familiar with the standard three-point thesis and five paragraph essay. I think it took a few years and a few different types of writing environments for me to realize that my writing is the most interesting and engaging when I’m writing about issues that are important to me – and especially anything on which I feel like I can provide a unique perspective.

 

I used to think that it was easier to write when I was given a clear prompt with a list of points that I had to cover, but as I've made my way through college I have realized that these guidelines tend to give me more and more stress. Now they make me feel trapped, especially when the topic is out of my control. Since becoming a writer for various online publications and being able to write whatever I felt like as a sophomore and junior, it became clear to me that writing on my own was the best way for me to explore my passions. Not only that, but when I take the time to research something that I'm interested in and make a clear argument about it, I can use that writing to foster discussions that will teach others or give them a new perspective on some issue.

 

Throughout my academic career I have also learned to use multimedia projects as a form of writing that bring topics up for discussion in a more visual and interactive way. When I can use my own experiences to explore my passions in a way that teaches others, my best writing - and the writing I am most proud of - emerges. The most important aspect of my development as a writer is that I have learned that I am able to write my strongest work when I am given the freedom to write about topics that engage me and relate to my experiences.

 

Throughout high school and even into my freshman year of college, writing academically with an open prompt was never really an option. Whenever an essay was assigned, it was very clear that we were supposed to write the standard five paragraph essay outlining our arguments about some topic. They were to be organized with a clear thesis stating points one, two, and three, and then going on to touch on each point with a quote or example and an explanation. And let me tell you, I was really good at these kinds of essays throughout high school. At least, I was able to get good grades in my classes with them. It was simple for me to write out what was expected of me, as many of the essays had very clear prompts for students to follow. However, even coming into my first year of writing classes in college, I didn’t really feel any attachment to my writing in these kinds of papers. I can’t remember being proud of many of them, or feeling like I or anyone else could really benefit from reading them.

 

One of the first English classes I took in college was one focused on fantasy literature; we did plenty of analysis of texts which has never been my favorite topic. The papers were mostly short essays that worked to improve argumentation skills; but there were two longer essays assigned throughout the year. At the time, I had hated writing them. As I said, literary analysis that mostly involves looking for underlying themes of sex and death don’t really float my boat. When the time came to write my first longer paper of the semester, I had to discuss some similarity between Orlando by Virginia Woolf and The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells. While I was able to find some similarities in the ways characters deal with societal pressures, I remember the essay taking me a while to articulate.

 

The paper was very formal and concise – it had to articulate an argument in less than 900 words. As much as I disliked writing it, somehow after turning it in, my GSI asked if she could keep it to use as an example for students in her future classes. Let’s just say I was confused. I was happy, of course, that my paper was apparently successful enough to be used as an example. But my GSI’s approval didn’t mask the fact that I wasn’t happy with my writing. I mean, listen to this:

 

“Orlando and The Invisible Man are both about the burdens that society can place onto a person, yet they differ in an important way. The main characters each have pivotal revelations about their own lives and based on those revelations make decisions that seal their fates. By looking at the main characters in Orlando and The Invisible Man, it can be seen that society’s pressures can either be superseded or entrapping based on the choices of the characters themselves.”

 

It’s just so boring! Thinking back, I wasn’t really interested in a deep analysis of these assigned books, and although I was able to create a good argument, I had no connection to the writing. I had no experiences that I could connect to what I was trying to say, and I didn’t feel like anyone could benefit much from reading what I had written. This lack of connection to the topic led to my writing being flat and boring, and it only served to answer the prompt that I was given.

 

Fast forward to sophomore year, when I began writing for an online college news site called Uloop News. I had discovered the website through one of the many posters taped onto corkboards around campus. I figured writing for an online publication targeted at college students would give me a chance to explore what it’s like to write more informally. Not only did it give me that chance, but as a writer I was able to work with my editor to write about any topic I wanted – provided that it would make for an interesting story. I wrote about anything from games to movies to gender issues, but for some reason the article that really stands out in my memory is the one I wrote about some incredible photosynthetic animals.

 

I had long been in love with a YouTube channel named SciShow, and when I saw the episode discussing a few of these creatures I thought I should do some research and write an article of my own. Although I’m a Communications major, I’ve always been interested in science, and I remember really putting my brain to work to sift through the research that I found and break it down into an easy to read article. The goal of the article was different than any academic essay I had written up to that point; I was trying to teach people about these animals in the hopes that some would get just as excited about them as I was. Because of this, I felt attached to my writing in a way that I never had before. I enjoyed the research and writing process, and I was proud of the way it turned out. While the article still maintained that academic voice that I had been writing in for so long, it took a baby step towards the more informal voice that I continued to work on throughout my time as a writer for Uloop. I also learned that the ability to interact with my audience through comment sections and by posting my work on various social media sites, I was able to get deeper into discussions of the topics. 

 

In the case of this article, I posted it on my Tumblr blog and ended up with over 600 people liking or reblogging the post. Not only did this response show me that people were interested in the topic, but that they enjoyed my writing and found that it showed them something new. Researching, writing, and sharing these articles sparked my passion for - as my Gateway writing portfolio’s title proudly states - writing to inform. The freedom given to me by my editor allowed me to explore as many different topics as I liked, and helped me to break away from the rigid writing prompts of my academic past. After a year or so of writing for various publications, I was ready for the turn that most of my classes were going to take.

 

My junior year, I was able to take my experience writing as a journalist and apply it to my academic writing. As I started taking higher level classes, I was given more freedom of topic choice for my papers. This freedom of choice allowed me to write Women in Gaming: Evolution of Gender Representations and Power, my favorite essay, which tops everything I had written before and have written since. The paper actually started out as a blog post assigned in Comm 365 – Visual Culture and Visual Literacy. As the title suggests, these blogs allowed us to choose a visual media example of our choice and analyze it based on the concepts we were learning. Given the choice of whatever I wanted, I wrote about a popular new video game – Bioshock Infinite – in relation to Lara Mulvey’s theory concerning the male gaze. If there’s anything you should know, it’s that I’ll write about gender representation and video game culture at any chance I get.

 

The final essay assignment itself was to take a blog post we had written previously and to expand upon it. In the original blog post I wrote about the main female character Elizabeth’s role in the game; first (and only very shortly) as a damsel trapped in a tower who quickly became an indispensable partner who led the main protagonist through the game and helped him to defeat his enemies with her supernatural power. For the final essay, I chose to apply the idea of the male gaze to various female game characters, starting with Princess Peach and ending with Elizabeth. I wrote the paper as an exploration of the ways in which gender representation within games has changed over the years – a topic that I am very much interested in.

 

I spent my time researching each character and finding out what others had to say about their designs. I wanted my essay to not only give an overview of each character, but to connect them together in a way that showed the evolution of the issue. I thought that this would be the best way to cover the issue but still leave it open for future discussion of new characters. This paper is by far the piece of writing that I am most proud of, because it allowed me to research and discuss a topic that is of personal importance to me. When there is a way for me to relate my own experiences to my writing and draw passion from my interest in the topic, my writing does its best work as a teaching tool. Listen to how much better this sounds, and how much more impactful it could be:

 

“…it is in the hands of both the community and the game industry to take the issues surrounding sexist female representations in games and change them permanently for the better. Power relationships have gone from blatantly sexually objectifying female characters or viewing them solely as prizes to be won to seeing them represented almost as equals in the games in which they do appear. However, the gap between the amount of female and male characters (much less protagonists) continues to be problematic, and representations will not be sufficiently balanced until the amount of male and female protagonists contain an equilibrium of well-developed, meaningfully crafted characters.”

 

Throughout the essay, instead of just following a prompt or giving an opinion on a topic that meant nothing to me, I was able to discuss something that I was passionate about, and that related directly to my own experience as a woman that loves to play games. I didn’t just outline a problem or explain a concept like in so many of my prior academic papers. Because I was able to choose a topic that I loved, I was able to discuss the issue, make a clear argument about it by applying a few different theories, and suggest what needed to be done in order to improve in the future. Being excited about my writing gives me the motivation to search for more and better examples to support my arguments, and even allows me to insert myself and my voice more clearly into my academic papers, just as I stated my opinion outright in my online articles. Even if my paper wasn’t an easy-to-read article that I could share across social media in order to spark a discussion, if I wanted to translate it into that form, I know that I could. Not only that, but I know that it would be successful because of the amount of thought I had put into it.

 

The creation of my Capstone project - Level Up, a magazine targeting the female gaming audience - was sort of a culmination of this most recent development. I was able to take my love of speaking on womens' issues in the gaming industry and community and combine it with a new form of media that I had never tried to use before. Being a digital magazine, even the format was more reminiscent of my time writing for online publications than it was of my time spent writing academically. I put in just as much research into my shorter articles as I did into my long academic essay, and every single topic I included in the magazine was one that I was able to write about in terms of my own experience and knowledge. It was probably the most fun (and the most difficult) project I've had the pleasure to work on in college. I've already shown it to a few of my friends and family members, and my hopes of having my writing be able to teach and spark discussions was fulfilled - many of the readers let me know that they had never heard of or known much about the issues I elaborated on, and they were glad to read about them and be able to see a different perspective on them. 

 

If there’s one thing I have learned throughout my development as a writer, it’s that if my writing is not interesting to me, then there is no way I should expect others to be interested in it or learn anything from it. It’s only when I really put my heart into writing about something important to me that it can be successful in my eyes. This ability to explore my passions through writing only seems to be possible when I have the freedom to select a topic on my own, and to structure the writing in a way that not only defines a problem, but offers some kind of solution. I also have come to realize that if what I’m writing about is important and interesting to me, then that will show through in my writing, and (hopefully) make it more interesting for my audience as well!

 

I’m not saying that any time I have to write about something I’m not in love with that it comes out terribly; my writing skills don’t vary from topic to topic, but I think that I feel most happy and successful as a writer when I can apply my interests and experiences directly to my writing – I think that is the best way to engage myself and my audience. While there is always room to improve my writing, it is clear to me that over recent years it has developed from lazy prompt answering to an engaged discussion of important issues that relate to my own experiences, and that seems like a pretty good improvement so far.