Zach Hill
Professor Djain
WRTG-101-019
30 April 2020
Final Reflection
It’s surreal to think that this is the end of my college writing experience. My freshman year has not been short of surprises, particularly this semester with a chaotic transition home and online. Still, within the chaos of the year, the college writing courses I have taken have taught me invaluable lessons regarding a multitude of writing styles and the academic writing process overall. I recognize notable changes and improvements in my writing towards the conclusion of this course compared to when I first arrived at American. This reflection also allows me an interesting opportunity to observe and notice opportunities for change in my writing. Now at the conclusion of our learning, it is quite easy to reflect upon and see how my writing can be strengthened, and incorporate the lessons I’ve learned this semester. Despite vast differences in content and subject matters, a common thread that connects my writing throughout this semester is the idea of fusing academic texts with personal experience to pose, answer, and create accessible discussions about literary work and the societal impacts.
Beginning with Assignment 1, I undertook the ambitious adventure of connecting literary work and it’s central themes to larger societal impacts. Beginning with William Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasure of Hating”, a piece claiming that hatred is institutionalized and ingrained into world culture, I finished with a product about climate change and existential crises both driven and combated by the ferocious passion (and hatred) in humans. While this was a particularly challenging assignment to illustrate connecting personal experience to climate change and theoretical ideas about hatred, upon reflecting and a semester of learning how to connect literary works with experience, I can acknowledge how this assignment could have incorporated more personal experience. Before learning about the innate relationship of complex literary works and personal experience and the bountiful ways to connect the two, I didn’t quite understand that my stories are being told in these challenging texts. Yes, Hazlitt speaks of inevitable hate as the only consistent variable in human nature, not something that may have a clear connection to my everyday life, but overlooking it and writing it off as too abstract to connect personally is a major mistake. I foreclosed the opportunity before even exploring it, something I’ve learned in this semester is far from productive and actually ends up losing great ideas that then are never explored. I could have drawn into consideration protests and civil disengagements I have participated in and the rising partisanship I view in even my young peers, and especially how hatred has been magnified in a digital, social media age with cancel culture. I think this would have been an interesting perspective to take, and regret not considering it.
This also ties in greatly to the central theme of accessibility, something I have tried to stress in all of my essays and blog posts. Accessibility in literature, specifically academic literature, has risen to the forefront of English education conversations recently. For academia, accessibility means curving the gatekeeping of who is and who isn’t allowed and encouraged to participate in academic texts and conversations.
Journalist Victoria Clayton summarized this movement when writing that “the problem of needlessly complex writing—sometimes referred to as an “opaque writing style”—has been explored in fields ranging from law to science. Yet in academia, unwieldy writing has become something of a protected tradition” (Clayton 1). This ‘opaque writing style’ may not be in cruel spirits, but the impact is debilitating. Audiences are cut out, powerful information is only held by the most educated, and elitism is engraved into academia as a whole. Clayton asserts that complex and unnecessary language that can be easily simplified serves as the main barrier. While I concur with that, I also believe that the way academic texts are structured is also a foundational problem: many academic works fail to consider other perspectives or invite readers of all walks of life to find a personal connection within the reading. When I see an academic text full of jargon and quoting tons of other sources, I am disincentivized to invest in the literature and find my own personal voice or connection within it. Instead of closing readers out, academia must open the doors for all. Until then, academia, increasingly in a digital age that presents cultural content online for all to see, will fail to reach a much broader audience.
My second assignment certainly stressed this point as a central theme. Through analyzing tattoos as modern literary architects and the English education curriculum, I learned multiple aspects about accessibility in writing. Academic writing in English education is often criticized as rigid, rules-based, and not adapting to include more students. Through things like tattoos, students can learn so much more by incorporating lessons that actually apply to them and speak to their life struggles. Increasing inclusivity and accessibility is not just about changing the structure of academic texts, it’s about changing the classroom too. This will allow students to see the impacts of literary texts by relating them to their own lives.
It’s also necessary to note that this writing course did not just rely on major assignments: weekly blog posts allowed us the opportunity to write, in shorter style, about questions posed by academic texts. Throughout these posts, I again stressed the importance of incorporating personal experience to showcase important issues and theories, as well as how I personally value some academic texts. For example, the fifth blog post focused on an incredible piece of writing by author Ta-Nehisi Coates. Through a simplistic writing style and extremely candid personal accounts, Coates creates emotional chokeholds for the audience that creates reader investment and translates a complex yet necessary point about race in America.
First-person experience, stories, and sharing memories are all potent ways to connect with the reader. Despite the multifaceted, complicated issues in academic texts, employing accessible writing styles similar to those of Coates cuts through confusion and delivers personable and powerful messages to readers. No matter what, the writing process moving forward and English education must make strides to adapt to modern times and classrooms. Assignments should encourage personal connection to a student’s life, which will force educators to re-imagine how they structure the classroom. But by simply connecting complex academic texts to the everyday struggles of students, and reconsidering what can be included in education, the academic literary world will grow and progress towards inclusivity.
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