Kyla Miller: A Writing Portfolio
It’s not always easy to look back on your own writing, personal or academic. After hours upon hours of writing and drafting an essay, I always feel a sense of accomplishment and pride when I get to print out those crisp white pieces of paper flowing with the ideas that took me so long to compose. Because of the effort I put in, I find myself feeling this blind acceptance and pride with my work, without much self-criticism—and let’s be honest, there are certainly some professors who can dish out enough of that for the two of us. But in all seriousness, looking back at my writing evolution was honestly rather painful. I’ve always considered myself a great writer. Sure, I struggled with reading as a kid (Confession: I was “Hooked on Phonics”) but writing, writing was what I Ioved, and truly believed I excelled at. Turns out, having to review my own work was kind of like getting a slap in the face—OUCH. Maybe I wasn’t always as great as I thought I was. But alas, there is a silver lining! It may have taken me four years, a writing minor, over 200 pages of essays, and I don’t even want to try to do the math on how many rough draft revisions, but I have certainly improved from my hyper organized, uncreative, one-dimensional papers that defined my freshman year English essays.
In order to better see how my writing has evolved over the last four years, it’s best to see where it began. This is an excerpt from a Communications 101 essay, where I was asked to pick a product and analyze the ways in which it uses effective or ineffective advertising strategies. I’ve chosen this intro paragraph to show just how structured and forced my writing was at this time. I knew that I needed an “attention grabbing” intro, and that I needed to lay out every point that I was going to make in the continuing paragraphs. Yes, it’s organized, but it comes off amateur and, quite frankly, boring.
“ ‘Proactiv Acne System is the number one best selling acne system!’ With a bold statistic like that, readers are immediately drawn to this advertisement. By allowing for a testimonial, pictures, in-depth descriptions of how the product works, and statistics, Proactive is portrayed as the most exceptional acne system available.”
If you hadn’t already guessed it from the robotic-like list structure I used to preview what my entire paper would be about, the preceding paragraphs outlined how the advertisement used testimonials, statistics, etc (in that exact order), and concluded with a very similar, boring, predictable conclusion. At the time, I thought I was doing exactly what I was supposed to. After all, this paper was organized, hit all of the points I needed to, and was “creative” in the introductory and concluding lines. What I didn’t realize at the time was that this “creative” structure could not be further from being inventive. In fact, it was on a completely different planet.
So why did I insist on writing in such a bland manner? Quite honestly, I think it was either one of two things. 1) I was incredibly scared what would happen if I were to step outside the normal realm of what I would consider “acceptable” academic writing OR 2) I just didn’t know where to begin. I think it boils down to the fact that I was still an amateur writer, trying so hard to make a “creative” piece within the confines of such strict rules. So, instead of accomplishing this, my writing just came off as a sad attempt at humor, inventiveness, etc. Well, that’s where Writing 220 came in. For the first time, a professor actually told me to forget every writing “rule” I had ever learned and compose writing the way I thought would be most effective. “So why learn this rules at all if we’re just supposed to ignore them,” I asked. He responded, “Well, so you can break them. You can’t break try to break a rule that you don’t even know exists!”
In an attempt to step outside the realm of what I considered “normal”, I re wrote a personal narrative that I had completed in high school and literally narrated it in an imovie I created. This voice over allowed me to put my own emotions into the writing and use pictures to communicate what my words simply couldn’t. The piece was titled “Countdown To Crash”, and it took the listener through a 3 hour course of events that led me to a car crash that was traumatizing for both myself and my sister, who was driving. When I finished this piece I was overall pleased with the content, but the presentation came off amateur and, honestly, a little bit awkward. Just as I said it was hard to go back and re-read my own writing, it was about ten times harder to not only be exposed to old writing, but also hear my own voice in a recording. AWFUL. But either way, it was new. It was different. And I was proud of that, even if it wasn’t as perfect as I had imagined. What I got out of this experience was that I was able to explore a different form of writing and better communicate the message that I thought was important for the audience to hear.
In a perfect world, this would be the “Aha!” moment where my writing style did a 180—going from boring and predictable to thought provoking, interesting and original, right? WRONG. Unfortunately for me, this writing project was rather unusual compared to the assignments I was given, and continue to be given, in every other form of collegiate academic writing besides my writing minor courses. This may be hard to believe, but not every professor has the patience or interest in reading student’s academic essays in various forms, tones, etc. In fact, most professors insist on such rigid writing that they give you a list with pre-set categories, bullet points of things you need to address—and yes. Even a specific order that each of these items must occur. “So where’s the space for creativity in that?” You may be asking. Sadly, there really isn’t, and I’ve had to learn how to adapt to these situations as well.
Being a psychology and communications double major, the majority of essays I have been asked to write from my Junior year on have been research based. They have a literature review, methods, results, discussion, etc. I’ve been given sample outlines, scholarly papers to refer to, and hours of instruction on how exactly to craft this type of essay. Despite this rigid style, I really do think that I have been able to find creativity in my synthesis of ideas and previous scholarly research to create essay that are narrow in stylistic creativity, but very rich in content creativity—and I’m okay with that (not that I really have a choice, anyways).
This is an example of my most recent research essay, which was a grant proposal I created in a Psychology course. Pay attention not to the bland style of writing (please, forgive me), but to the ideas that I am presenting. I’m aware that this project proposal may be more difficult for non psychology majors to grasp onto, but the idea that I presented in this grant proposal was praised for being unique and thought provoking, which I will certainly count as points for creativity, even if it is just for ideas, not a specific writing style.
"The current study aims to analyze the relationship between birth order, difficulty of task, and procrastination. It’s the goal of the researchers to create a comprehensive observational study which can affectively separate subjects categorically by birth order and condition, and correctly measure procrastination in a reliable and valid fashion. We hypothesize that (1) first borns will be less likely to procrastinate compared to later borns, (2) the more difficult a task is, the more likely a person will be to procrastinate, and (3) there will be an interaction effect for birth order and difficulty of task on procrastination: first borns will be less affected by the difficulty of the task, and will procrastinate less, whereas later borns will be more affected by the difficulty of the task and will procrastinate more."
Although it has a set structure, I was praised for the unique idea and the originality that I showed in the literature review. Never before had birth order affects been analyzed in the form of procrastination in a set task, let alone with the manipulation of the difficulty of task. I came to this idea by shifting through dozens of psychology articles only to find this specific gap in the literature, which I thought could be useful and interesting knowledge if the null hypothesis was in fact proven. “So…what??”, you may be asking. And yes, this is about my development was a writer specifically, not my development as a psychologist. However, I believe there are very specific qualities that I have developed throughout my college career that have truly helped shape my quality of writing, specifically with content and quality of ideas, and this is a great example of a unique idea being formulated. Yes, there was a set structure, but nobody told me what I had to write about. I came about this proposal through my own creative thinking process, which is essential to improve in order to then put those ideas on paper in an interesting fashion. I now know that I know that I am able to take research that has been published and combine it in a way that is relevant and innovative in that space. As I have come to find, this type of writing is something that I really do enjoy and excel at; however, I certainly don’t mind the freedom allotted me in my writing courses.
For my final project for the minor in writing program, I have chosen to stick with the theme of my evolution as a writer and focus on a project about happiness. Not only will this project be presented as a research paper with a more creative twist (something I have yet to be able to do), but it will also focus on my own evolution, where I will use myself as a case study to see if you really can change your base level of happiness over time. Because I have only ever been able to be creative through my ideas in research papers, I would like to use this opportunity to extend that creativity to my language and tone as well. In addition, I will be using various techniques to try to improve my happiness over time, and I’m going to log my progress over the course of one month. My hope is that this project will be informative while also being creative and interesting to a broad range of people. Although I am using myself as the case study, I want people to feel they can employ the same techniques to their daily life, or modify them at their own discretion, and hopefully make their lives just a little bit happier, each and every day!