AUTHOR'S NOTES

How to write an Essay 101: Hook. Two to three sentences of context. Thesis. Three body paragraphs, each with a topic sentence, two pieces of evidence, two sentences for analysis, and a tie-in to the thesis. Repeat. This is what writing looked like for me throughout my academic career—throughout my life, really. Writing felt boring. Monotonous. Robotic. My growth within the craft was nonexistent. I wasn’t being challenged, or taught new techniques, or introduced to new genres. Just essay, essay, essay. Plug the parts into the template to spit out the final product. This is what writing looked like for me before taking the Gateway Course. I was extremely excited to begin my journey through the Minor in Writing with the Gateway course because I knew. I knew that finally I was going to find what I had been searching for after many years. I was going to be challenged, taught new techniques, and most of all, introduced to new genres. I was going to get to write about what I wanted to write about with no limits, no requirements, no directions, no guidelines, no nothing. Everything would be on my terms. And that felt great, to put it lightly.

A fitting place to begin the story of my experience throughout the course is with my origin piece. I chose my origin piece both because it felt unfinished and because it concerns a topic I am passionate about, and a topic I have battled with for almost three years now. Before I introduce the topic, I want to discuss why my piece felt unfinished. I wrote my origin piece, which was an essay, for ENGLISH 325. For those of you unfamiliar with the class, it’s titled “The Art of the Essay”, and that is exactly what it was about: the art of the essay. Because it was for a class, it had certain requirements. It had to be an essay, it had to be at least seven pages (if I remember correctly), and the topic had to concern something that was unresolved for us. I feel like that forced me to go a certain direction, because in my opinion, the purpose of a genre is dictated by the reader. For example, one is more likely to read a poem if they want emotions evoked, rather than, say, an informative essay, whose main purpose is to inform. Therefore, I wasn’t able to do what I truly wanted to. 

Before I begin discussing my experiments, it’s time for me to introduce the topic I chose, which is eating disorders and consequently other mood disorders such as depression and anxiety. I chose this topic because it is something I have battled with every single day for the past three years, and battled with shame. Eating disorders are a rather taboo topic, and even though I shouldn’t be embarrassed or ashamed to have one, I am. I wanted to help dismantle this stigma surrounding it by writing about it, and this took the form of different purposes with different genres.

I’m going to talk about each experiment in reverse order for a reason that will make sense once you reach the first experiment. So, for my third experiment, the genre I chose was the op-ed. I was hesitant to choose a genre such as this one at first—I considered it a rather radical choice for myself to make—because I knew I wanted to write about my experiences, and op-eds I’ve read in the past did not do this. But, I thought I would experiment with the genre anyway because I saw the value in entering a conversation with other voices surrounding your own. After reading the model pieces I chose, I realized that it is actually okay to include your personal experiences in an op-ed, which is an aspect of the genre that I liked. If I did end up choosing this genre for my final experiment, my purpose would have been to persuade my audience that eating disorders are relevant and pervasive.

For my second experiment, the genre I chose was the personal essay, with the purpose of informing others how to be more compassionate towards those with eating disorders and informing others with respect to understanding eating disorders better. It’s the same genre as my origin piece, but I chose it anyway because when I wrote my origin piece, I knew next to nothing about personal essays. I thought that maybe through the experimentation process I would learn enough to be able to write a personal essay that looked completely different from the original. And, personal essays rely on personal experiences, so that was a plus. I did end up learning more about the structure of personal essays and how they’re typically constructed, and what stood out to me most was the fact that personal essays tell stories. The message or what have you is revealed through the story, which makes personal essays a more creative type of essay than I’m used to dealing with. I fell in love with this aspect of the genre and I’m certain that if I did choose it, with the knowledge I gained through the experimentation process, I would create a piece that I would be very proud of.

Now, the first experiment. I saved the best for last because the genre I chose for my first experiment is the genre I always knew I would choose, even when the other two experiments were just a twinkle in my eye. This genre allows me to realize my true vision for this project, which is to make those who have little to no knowledge about eating disorders feel compassion with regards to my experiences and eating disorders in general. The genre I’m talking about is poetry. I would say poetry is my preferred genre out of any other because I’ve always thought that poetry is a genre with no restrictions; you can literally do anything you want to. And, the decisions you can make with regards to making meaning within a poem are endless—aside from simply word choice and syntax, you can manipulate the shape of the poem through line breaks and line lengths and stanza breaks and caesurae and enjambment, and you can manipulate the sound of a poem through liquid consonants, mute consonants, and a number of different types of rhymes and meter. Additionally, because poems are fairly short, every single decision you make within a poem is intentional and works towards making meaning, and as a writer, I love making every decision intentional.

Transitioning back to how I felt about writing before this experimentation process, I’m glad my thoughts changed. I’m glad that my mindset towards writing will never be the same. Never again will I view writing to be boring, or monotonous, or robotic. There are so many different genres to try and techniques to learn and aspects of the craft to experiment with. And, after taking this class, I have the tools to do it all.