Writing

 

Writing has become something that I have come to enjoy more over time. It has become a way for me to express myself and to be able to communicate to ideas and information to others. Over the course of my college career my writing skills have improved which has helped me overall to be a better communicator.

 

Many of my writing pieces that I have done during my time in college have been collaborative. This came with a new set of challenges to overcome. The greatest of these challeges would have to be creating a unified voice. One example of this would be the white paper that I helped to create during the grant writing course that I took last fall. My group worked with Breaking Barriers, a local group that supports the digital education, to help them find a grant that would help them start a week long camp that would help community members aqcuire digital literacy.

 

Another collaborative piece was for the Usability and Instructions Writing course I took the spring of my senior year. We were given the opportunity to work on a cross  disciplinary project for scientists that received grants from the National Science Foundation. For this Humanities students helped to create help documentation for an application for citizen scientists. This particular piece is the usability test plan that we had created for our user testing

 

The piece that I enjoyed the most creating was a creative writing piece for a detective fiction course I took at community college. It was a great experience to be able to explore one of my favorite genres and to learn more about the stories that I have always loved.  For the last assignment of the semester we created our own detective story and were given complete creative freedom. We also had the opportunity to work in pairs if we so chose. I took this opportunity to work with a good friend whose imagination at times surpasses my own. Over the course of the next few weeks we created a story about a vigilante type character that is forced into the role of detective in disco era Baltimore. I then took this idea and gave it life on paper. It is something very different from anything else that I have ever created, pulling inspiration from placed like The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Phantom of the Opera, and Frankenstein. Despite the dark nature of the piece it was the most fun to create.