Throughout my development as an individual, my ability to voice my opinions has always been something that I have held as one of my traits of higher value. I have always wanted to improve my writing, often taking on random prompts and allowing my mind to envelop a creative process. My desire to improve as a writer and as a critical thinker has always been something that I have maintained within the recesses of my mind. My main passion for studying has always been pertaining to the study of the mind and the field of psychology.
Throughout the semester, I did my best to select the most controversial pieces pertaining to each unit of study within this class’ runtime. It was somewhat of a challenging experience for me to find the motivation to want to exercise creative thinking within the surrounding ecosystem that was bred by the quarantine. It was very difficult to find time to be able to maintain all of my classes with how busy life has been within the pandemic. From sick family members to financial expenses, as well as the low level of free time I actually had- it was almost as if it was impossible to find the motivation to be as passionate as I would have liked to have been.
Nevertheless, I was not particularly intent on allowing the emotional/mental rut that I was in set me back any further than it needed to. I found that my greatest resource to my development was found within the cracks of time that I had to myself, as well as the motivation that surfaced from within that pushed for me to be a better writer. As a result of this, the developments that I made in that time were much more profound than other writing assignments that I have previously worked on. It was as if each and every assignment was given an incredible amount of thought and effort into.
The first writing assignment that displayed this effect of growth within me in great detail was the Feature Profile essay. The Feature Profile seemed as if a perfect method to get back into the swing of things. It allowed me to be able to utilize my online connections from different cultures and be able to analyze several aspects of their life in contrast to my own. I remember the discussions that I held with my subject, a close friend that I have known for many years, and I remember how fascinating it was to absorb information that I have always wanted to ask, but never got the opportunity to. As I wrote down the information, I noticed that I was just simply restating a lot of the information that was recited to me. It was not exactly a genuine contrast between my cultural experience and theirs, but rather a retelling of their life story and their aspirations with minimal reference to my viewpoint of it.
I made sure to work on that aspect heavily, until it seemed that there was more than one identity that was being reflected on within the feature profile. It was not too difficult to reach the minimum word count as well as allude to the structure within the rubric once this was attained. From this writing assignment, I learned of the importance of evaluating the information I receive from an informant, and continued to strive to create writing assignments with great detail.
The second writing assignment that continued to develop my passion as a writer within this semester was the Field Observation essay. This particular essay allowed me to choose a controversial topic on the internet, in the form of an online community and gather resources in the form of opinions and statements in order to analyze the subject. I did not struggle with this essay as much as I did the first essay, finding that I had much better success because of how controversial my topic was. Due to the popularity of the topic, it was simple enough for me to outline my work and understand the overall community that I wanted to study by comparisons with other communities within the same vein of interests.
The last writing assignment that developed my passion as a writer was the literature review. Taking from the great success that the second writing assignment had paved for my personal development, I decided to double down on the controversial topics and utilize the ongoing discussion of police brutality as an issue. This essay was notably simpler to format and construct, given how many scholarly articles already existed within the subject that highlighted the same sentiments that I chose to express within my paper. As within the second writing assignment, a controversial topic with heavy relation to the current developments in society was extremely useful for reigniting my passion for writing, even within these confusing times.
My writing seemed to flourish when it was pertaining to issues that I actually felt passionate about, therefore, the third writing assignment showed the greatest growth in my personal standards as a writer. It was as if my interest in formal writing was as high as it was prior to the quarantine, which was a definitive improvement to my personal motivations and aspirations. It was made clear to me, not only through the actual quality of work that was being written by me, but through the efficiency of my writing routine that this assignment was much more substantial than the others.
In hindsight, each writing assignment brought some modicum of growth that continued to bring me forward. Though I did not make any significant improvements from where I believe I personally was just before the start of the quarantine, I believe that the experiences that these assignments have given me have provided me with some subtle deviation to the mean. I look forward to my writing continuing to develop in future assignments, and I believe that this semester has been very productive towards that growth, despite the difficulties that we have all faced.
