Small Stakes Revision

Writing What Moves You

The piece that I chose that moved me was a speech given by Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson. His speech was actually an answer to the question “in your years as an astrophysicist, what is the most astounding fact that you have come to know”. Since this was on the spot and vocal, not much attention can be paid to rhetorical devices, because nothing was planned, but without planning, Dr. Tyson was still able to move me in a way only music has matched.

            For the first half of the speech, Dr. Tyson gave the audience a brief history of the origin of life, as defined by the big bang and primordial soup theories. What I really liked about his introduction was the polymerization of story-telling and scientific knowledge that he put into describing the birth of the universe as we know it. Tyson said “the atoms that make up the human body are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures”. The doctor was simply describing nuclear fusion, but he was able to do so with vivid imagery. He said that “crucibles cooked light elements into heavy elements”. As an upcoming scientist, I could just picture a large bowl (which is a crucible, in chemistry) in which the nuclei of atoms were being fused together. Even though this is not what happened in the slightest, Tyson gave a clear picture of a process that scientists believe produced everything we know. To someone who is not science-oriented, a crucible would assume its primary annotation of a test or trial, and the person would still be able to picture the elements being cooked. Later on, Tyson said that the stars “went unstable in their later years” and that they “collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy”. In this sentence, the speaker created great imagery with the words “collapsed”, “exploded”, and “scattering”. While the imagery was vivid, the word that came to my attention in that assertion was “guts”. This man, world-renowned for astrophysics, still considered himself human enough to use as elementary a word as “guts”. This diction epitomized the idea we have been discussing in English: speaking sincerely. With as much fame as Dr. Tyson has, he has still stayed humble enough to use a normal vocabulary to describe an extremely complex process. A place where the speaker used some rhetoric was toward the middle, when he said “we are part of this universe; we are in the universe”. By utilizing parallelism, Tyson was able to reinforce the face that we (humans) are in this vast universe. This reinforcement paid off when the speaker said “the universe is in us”. This created a deep feeling, because I had never thought about myself in relation to the universe in this way. Dr. Tyson has demonstrated the type of wonder I want to have for the universe throughout my entire childhood, and through this speech, he has allowed me to appreciate the universe that much more, as well as my own life, because he made me realize that my atoms also came from stars.

Not to sound pretentious, but I did not make many changes to this essay. The only things I struggled with in this piece were not going off on scientific tangents and maintaining an air that the theories of science are not the way, the truth, and the life. I changed a few minor words here and there to clear the wording up, but overall, I am proud of this finished product. A major theme to this class was making writing our own, and I feel like I did that in this work. I was able to nerd out on the word “crucible” while still making a serious assertion. A goal of mine was to write more personally, and I feel like this piece is the first step I took in the class toward being sincere in my writing. At the end, I compared Dr. Tyson’s wonder of the universe to my own, and I feel like a reader would see a little bit of my personality in this work

Writer's Profile

        This class has been my journey from a robot who writes papers to a human being that produces works of writing that are personal and sincere, while still satisfying their purposes. You told us at the beginning of the semester that one of your goals was to help us individualize ourselves and find our unique styles as writers, and I feel as though the class has been successful in doing that. The articles we read help a lot, because they offered many different views on how writing should be carried out. You didn’t simply hammer an ideology into our minds; you let us read the articles and decide for ourselves, which I consider to be very important in my growth as a writer. Anne Lammot’s “Shitty First Drafts” was the most influential article, in my experience. Utilizing her strategies has made writing easier and more enjoyable. The “This I Believe” assignment was the most helpful assignment in developing a personal style. In that essay, I was able to bleed out completely onto the screen, and it was one of the best feelings I’ve ever had while writing. The only thing that hindered my journey was the research project at the end. Even though it couldn’t be as personal, it was a good exercise of trying to add uniqueness to something as dull-sounding as a research project. My writing process has changed dramatically over time. Coming out of high school, my goal was to create the longest essay with the longest words and the most rigid structure. Now, my goal is to create writing that is my own but still serves its purpose and is appropriate for the target audience. I follow Anne Lammot’s philosophy that banging out a subpar first draft in haste is the best way to get a work done. Before, I would spend minutes on each sentence, trying to find better words and analyzing syntax and diction. Now, I write the first draft quickly and improve the writing until I am confident enough to call it a work of writing. At the beginning of the semester, my goals were to become a more personal writing and to be more creative in my writing. To achieve these goals, I tried to write papers without the use of a thesaurus, and I strived to add figurative language to my writing. I feel as though I have made large steps in becoming a personal and creative writer, although I do not believe my journey is over. In the future, I would honestly like to become a master of figurative language, because the use of metaphors has always intrigued me. Becoming talented with metaphors would help me in prose writing and in lyricism, which is a major outlet of mine. The only major challenge I had during the course was to break away from the bondage that was secondary education. I had been taught the same way of writing for many years, and I had written countless essays. I finally had a firm grasp on writing in high school, and I was able to make A’s on essays easily. It was stressful to be told that rigid structure and impersonal writing was not the way. You told us to make the writing our own, and I was scared. My strategy for overcoming this challenge was to try and write as if I was having a conversation. This seemed to work, as I do not remember getting reprimanded for my writing. The class has made me look a writing from a whole new perspective.  You taught us that writing can be much more beautiful than a five paragraph essay. Because my definition of “good writing” has changed from good structure and vocabulary to sincerity and purpose, I have been able to find beauty in almost any piece of writing. The peer reviews seemed to help me the most in my writing process, because they gave me a sense of what my writing was accomplishing. My peers were able to tell me if they were impacted by my writing or not, and that helped my process along quite a lot. At the beginning of the semester, the only thing I expected from the class was to come out a better writer. I didn’t know what a “better writer” meant at the time, but I hoped that I would improve as a result of the class. In my introductory reflective essay, I wrote that I wanted to become able to write fluidly, so that I could get through timed writing and long papers. I feel like my fluidity has increased significantly, because now I have a problem stopping when I’m writing when before I had trouble getting the first sentence out. The assignments the contributed the most to my writing style were the personal credo and the “This I Believe” essay. Like I said, I was able to put all of my thoughts and emotions onto the screen, and that helped me discover a lot of things about myself as a writer and as a person. I’ve always felt that my stories could have positive impact, and these to assignment showed me that I could actually make a difference with my writing. This realization gave me a new found confidence in my abilities to write. In all, I do not think I have turned a new leaf in writing, because I still try too hard on assignments due to self-consciousness, but I do feel as though I have made significant progress in my journey as a writer.

Theory of Writing

Going into English class, I had what I now consider a warped view of what writing should be. Having been a bookworm during high school, I had developed a five paragraph essay that could achieve good marks in almost any setting; I thought I had it all figured out. The only problem with my essays was that they were unbearable to write. The process took hours because I had to think about each word and analyze the effectiveness of it before putting it on paper. I got into class and the teacher told us that the structure that had been hammered into us since sixth grade could be the downfall of our writing and that satisfying a purpose did not have to come down to five paragraphs with two examples and analyses each. From that moment on, my definition and process  of writing have been evolving, and writing has become much easier for me, as a result. To me, writing is thinking and feeling actively and putting those thoughts and emotions into words. Each piece of writing is a soul search for answers or an exploration of one’s feelings. Good writing serves its purpose and is from the heart and brain of the writer. As long as a piece of writing can do these two things, then it can be considered good. Even if the purpose of a work is to serve as therapy for the writer, satisfying that purpose sincerely would demonstrate good writing. When I write, I consider only the purpose of the writing. In order to be sincere, I just write. I do not try to be sincere, because trying to be sincere undermines the goal of sincerity. I use this idea of good writing in everything I write, only changing my approach to fit structure guidelines in school assignments. Over the course of the year, I have become a more creative and personal writer, which were my goals for the semester. I feel as though I am having a conversation when I am writing now. My definition of genre has also changed. Before, the writing for every genre had certain attributes and I felt that those elements had to be present in order to write sufficiently. Now, I see a genre as a word to describe the audience, purpose, and medium of a piece of writing. Since the beginning of the semester, my goal was to get out of my own way—to leave the tone and vocabulary of my writing be—because I wanted the assignments to be done by Kenneth Sisk, not by the android, KS1217. If I do not have a stake in what I’m writing, I try to create a hypothetical person who does have a stake in the matter, and then I empathize with that person. I have come to think that writing that is not your own is worthless, and strive to let each piece come from my heart and brain.

Writing What Moves Me

The piece that I chose that moved me was a speech given by Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson. His speech was actually an answer to the question “in your years as an astrophysicist, what is the most astounding fact that you have come to know”. Since this was on the spot and vocal, not much attention can be paid to rhetorical devices, because nothing was planned, but without planning, Dr. Tyson was still able to move me in a way only music has matched.

            For the first half of the speech, Dr. Tyson gave the audience a brief history of the origin of life, as defined by the big bang theory and primordial soup theory. What I really liked about his introduction was the polymerization of story-telling and scientific knowledge that he put into describing the birth of the universe as we know it. Tyson said “the atoms that make up the human body are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures”. The doctor was simply describing nuclear fusion, but he was able to do so with vivid imagery. He said that “crucibles cooked light elements into heavy elements”. To an upcoming scientist, I could just picture a large bowl (which is a crucible, in chemistry) in which the nuclei of atoms were being fused together. Even though this is not what happened in the slightest, Tyson gave a clear picture of a process that produced everything we know. To someone who is not science-oriented, a crucible would assume its primary annotation, and the person would still be able to picture elements being cooked. Later on, Tyson said that the stars “went unstable in their later years” and that they “collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy”. In this sentence, the speaker created great imagery with the words “collapsed”, “exploded”, and “scattering”. The word that came to my attention in that assertion was “guts”. This man, world-renowned for astrophysics, still considered himself human enough to use as elementary a word as “guts”. This diction epitomized everything we’ve talked about in English over the past couple weeks: speaking sincerely. With as much fame as Dr. Tyson has, he still stayed humble enough to use a normal vocabulary to describe an extremely complex process. A place where the speaker used some rhetoric was toward the middle, when he said “we are part of this universe; we are in the universe”. By utilizing parallelism, Tyson was able to reinforce the face that we (humans) are in this vast universe. This reinforcement paid off when the speaker said “the universe is in us”. This created a deep feeling, because I had never thought about the myself in relation to the universe in this way. Dr. Tyson has demonstrated the type of wonder I want to have for the universe throughout my entire childhood, and through this speech, he has allowed me to appreciate the universe that much more, as well as my own life, because he made me realize that my atoms also came from stars.