WP1 Zach Williams
Part 1
As an English major and a student with a heavy interest in the Humanities, I have written a lot since coming to college, from research papers on the life sciences to essays analyzing passages from Shakespeare. Of course, there were some instances of voluntary writing sprinkled amidst all of the rough drafts and revisions, but the vast majority of my work was required and strictly judged. This brings me to an important realization: as an English major, I voluntarily signed up for most of this required writing. Thus, I must look at my academic work through this lens.
In sophomore year, I wrote a research paper about lab-grown meat and its viability as a future food source for a GE class. This was one of those rare instances of required writing that I didn’t sign up for. In spite of that fact, this was one of the papers that I had the most fun working on throughout my entire college career, because of the creative license I had - I was allowed to write on any topic that I found interesting under the gargantuan umbrella of biology. My inherent interest in the subject made the normally arduous process of sifting through research easy, and the intriguing findings and perspectives of the research authors actually deepened my odd passion for lab-grown meat, rather than halting it in its tracks. Interestingly enough, what seemed to cement my enjoyment of this essay was the minimal writing process my professor made us undergo before submitting our final product - all we had to do was submit a research proposal and get approval. Don’t get me wrong, I love having feedback and working collaboratively on creative projects, but the freedom I had with this piece has made it one of my most memorable college works.
Last summer, I was interning at a small online business in the restaurant industry. I didn’t do much writing over the summer except for a handful of articles I had published on magazines and websites involved in the restaurant space. One of these articles was entitled “Curating the Perfect Menu”, a short piece that gave restaurant owners all the secret ingredients they needed to make their menu exceptional, written by a college student who had only ever been to a restaurant to eat. Essentially, my position in the company was pseudo-expert… and it worked. I felt that particular strain of Writer’s Impostor Syndrome so poignantly, yet I kept on churning pieces out on an almost-daily basis. I did have the assistance of a full-time employee to give me writing feedback, but he only offered light critiques and adjustments, and I did face the daunting task of pitching my article to editors, but surprisingly to me, many of them accepted my work.
Importantly, this was the first time in which my writing had the incentive of payment and publication attached to it. This heightened the stakes along with my ambition. My writing felt three-dimensional: important to me as a creative exercise, a source of compensation, and a possible way to further my career, rather than the one-dimensional dynamic I was used to - submitting a paper with rigid guidelines on a specific topic intended only for my professor. These factors, along with finding a real-world skill that aligned with my talents, reinvigorated and expanded my otherwise lackluster writing persona of that moment.
The semester before that summer of writing for financial gain, I was in an introductory narrative class, which ended up being one of my favorite experiences here at USC. It didn’t start that way, though. I was very nervous to take part in a class where I would have to share my creative writing pieces with others, especially in a setting where I knew there would be some of the best student writers I had ever encountered. And, above all, the professor who presided over the workshop was an accomplished and brilliant author who had that British knack for sarcasm and harsh criticism, while still remaining a highly likable and kind person. So, as someone who hadn’t written anything creative since my haikus from elementary school, I had my work cut out for me.
There were two narratives we had to write throughout the semester, both of which would be workshopped in class. I remember when the professor called the ending to my first narrative “daft” as clear as day, and how, following that, some of my kind-spirited classmates emphatically raised their hands and praised parts of my story as a consolation. They weren’t wrong - there were definitely some times where my writing prowess showed. But, deep down, I knew my professor was right, so something had to be done.
My next narrative, then, was an unquestionable improvement on the first. I focused heavily on the flow of the story, crafting intriguing imagery, and above all, preventing the urge to compose a daft ending. In the workshop, my professor expressively complimented my work, and my classmates took their time discussing the elements they liked. I felt the unique thrill of seeing my effort achieve success in front of my own eyes.
After workshopping our second narrative, our professor assigned us our final project, which was to expand one of our completed narratives into a twenty-page short story and submit it by finals week. Naturally, I chose my second work, as it was simply better than the first and I had more enthusiasm for the substance of its story. Unfortunately, though, my good intentions didn’t pan out because before I knew it, I was busy studying for all of my other finals and I postponed my final narrative to literally the day it was due. I had to write eight more quality pages that flowed coherently from the rest of my narrative, and to top it all off, I decided to rewrite all twenty pages of it in a few hours. It was perhaps the most legendary feat of procrastination in my decorated career. So, I ratcheted up my adrenaline to unsustainable levels and finished with hours to spare.
However, the quality of my writing didn’t reflect the extraordinariness of my speed, and overall, I diluted the strength of the story I was so proud of. The obvious reason for this was that I procrastinated, but there was something else revealed to me - that writing for an audience (of more than one) was an important incentive for performance. This realization dovetailed neatly into the writing work I did for my internship mentioned in the last section, and it has been important for me ever since.
I find it fitting to end this portion with some discussion about an essay for an English Literature class I took, which is my major specialization. The class revolved around the phenomenon of monsters in literature and how they reflected the social and cultural values of their time. Because of its unique nature, this class will likely end up being one of my favorite English classes I have ever taken throughout my academic career. The essay in question was entitled “The Interconnectivity of Monsters and Ecology”, and it explored how literary monsters related to and influenced the habitats and landscapes around them, and how those aspects were juxtaposed against the humans or protagonists of the story.
This essay offered the fulfillment I was seeking when I volunteered to complete so much required writing as an English major - it was a sort of breakdown from a mature, educated perspective of the monsters and stories that had sparked my imagination when I was young. It showed me how my aptitudes could be used to satisfy my own intellectual curiosity, even when I was simply completing an assignment. At the end of the day, this essay fell prey to the trappings of the process approach to composition - outlines, first drafts, and more, but I didn’t mind. Just as it had happened with every aforementioned, highly enjoyable work, my perception of what I would be required to write as a student of literature was broken.
Part 2
A while back, I took a GE class about Anthropology and Archaeology. For our final project, we had to write a research paper on an archaeological site of our choice. I have had a life-long fascination with the site of Petra in modern-day Jordan, so discussing that was my first inclination when this paper was assigned.
Specifically, my focus was on the artifactual evidence that archaeologists have uncovered at Petra and what it revealed about the life and culture of the local Nabataean people. Because I was synthesizing and describing the finds of others, I used engaging and descriptive language to keep my audience’s attention from drifting away, rather than employing assertive rhetoric to sway the opinions of my readers. However, this being a research paper, I was speaking in the realm of fact, not in the realm of fantasy and imagination, so I curbed my creative tendencies to a minimum. Most of the sentences throughout read as recollections of facts, presented in a package as neat and succinct as possible.
In other words, my text wasn’t entertaining, nor was it supposed to be. The only person who would ever see my paper was my professor - it’s not like I was publishing the never-before-seen juicy details of a new finding from Petra. Underneath the explicit language of the assignment requirements, my teacher’s implicit directive for us was to simply determine if we had any interest in archaeology and if we wanted a strong grade in the class. Thus, this document wasn’t crafted for the public eye, so I didn’t spend too much time worrying about the merit of my writing itself and focused my attention on squeezing in as many facts about Petra as I could. However, in some form, this document was intended for me, because of my aforementioned deep fascination with Petra. Not in the sense that it was written for me to revisit, but that I found the process of gathering research exciting.
This segues neatly into the intention of the paper when it is separated from the requirements of my instructor. This was a chance for me to use academic time to finally explore Petra after only ever maintaining a surface-level understanding of it. I found myself getting lost in the research process and unconsciously drifting towards material that was less rigorously analytical (for example, detailing the exact metrics of three different pieces of pottery found in a random dwelling in Petra) and more holistic in scope, that talked about Petra, its people and its culture in relation to a specific topic. And there were two reasons why I crafted this paper in the way I did: one, because the professor strictly demanded a research paper, and two, because I enjoyed ingesting information about the site so I relayed as many of the facts as I could. Turning back to the vocabulary aspect of the paper, I suppose that I included morsels of descriptive, engaging writing because I felt an urge to, to do justice to my fascination for Petra. It wasn’t explicitly laid out in the rubric for the papers to be written reverently for their topics, but I certainly took that approach. I wanted so badly to take the knowledge I had gained and spin it into a narrative-style, historical lesson because that’s my inclination as a writer, rather than a sterile, analytical piece… but at the end of the day, I had to mold it into something the instructor would accept.
As it has been hinted at throughout this portion, the occasion for my writing about Petra was an intersection between academic requirement and my personal history with the place. Aside from the prompt, my text responds to my desire to delve deeper into this monument of world history. However, I could also posit that it responds to a widely-held desire in the archaeological world to lift the veil and see the whole picture of ancient life at Petra, which was a sentiment I found frequently throughout my research. My research paper didn’t provide any new insight, but in its act of being created and submitted, it does encapsulate and magnify this collective desire.
Appropriately, then, my work doesn’t clash with any of the many previously published work and research in the discursive context of Petra. Throughout my paper, I sustain the scholarly viewpoint that Petra was a place where many ancient cultures converged, intersecting with and influencing each other to inform the Nabataean culture, which blossomed into its own unique society that resembled a unique amalgamation of many of the most important societies of the ancient world, from the Egyptians to the Romans.
Considering all of this deems my work to be reflective in nature. My goal was to express interest in Petra, and perhaps be a tiny cog in the wheel that spurs archaeologists, anthropologists, and laymen around the world to gain new understanding of this site, and preserve it for future generations.