molly tompkins

My Writing Curriculum

Exploring Disciplines

My high school writing experience was limited to, probably like most of us, rhetorical analysis. I did not read much beyond classic novels and expository articles. My high school did not have any diverse classes beyond AP Language and AP Literature. Since I did not have experience in any unconventional academic disciplines, I remember the Michigan course guide overwhelming me. I did not even know the meaning of many of the class categories I read. Cultural Anthropology intrigued me, Great Books scared me and I had no idea what Women’s Studies even meant. Despite my worries, I jumped right in, electing courses in all of these and other disciplines. This was my first of many beneficial steps in getting outside my comfort zone as a writer.

I took a memoir class with the renowned Ralph Williams and was fascinated by his animated, unconventional approach to teaching. The course content focused on things I had (shockingly) never learned about in school: the AIDS epidemic in America in the 1980s and Holocaust victims. Throughout freshman year, as I exposed myself to different disciplines, the scope of my writing increased. However, when reading back over my writing from the variety of courses I took, I noticed that while I expanded the disciplines I studied, I often stuck to the same writing format. Most of my writing from these courses is either rhetorical or comparative analysis. I found it to be simple in prose and lacking complexity in terms of argument. I easily got to the crux of issues, but rarely was I going beyond analyzing what I believed the “author intended” in terms of interpretation and asking myself “So what,” as I later learned to do.

Narrowing Focus

Sophomore year of college I began to narrow my writing focus through an introduction to business writing and the writing minor introduction. I knew I liked writing and I was getting better at it, but I needed more direction that the writing minor began to provide. I gained confidence in my writing through exposure to great professors and peers that challenged me. I practiced argumentation and developed the ability to make concrete, precise claims that I backed up. In the writing minor introduction, I explored the very topic that got me interested at the beginning of high school even further. My minor gateway project focused on repurposing the writing I had done previously in the pictorial history book I published in high school to raise money to save my local ski hill from closure. I experimented with new media for the first time, developing a website and Instagram for the cause, and began to explore my initial interest in journalism further. For this project, I focused my work on telling a story. I began to think of all writing in that way: for what audience was I writing, and what story was I telling? However, I struggled with determining why, or how, my perspective or my story should really matter.

Expanding Boundaries

This stage of my writing career began with a Linguistics course I took junior year in combination with my professional writing course that is required for my business degree. This is where I began to realize the importance of writing for a particular audience, and most importantly, maintain my own voice and style while doing so.  I found that business writing was one of my biggest strengths; I was good at direct, straightforward prose. Studying sociolinguistics while taking a class on how to write a concise email challenged me to think about language at both a micro and macro level. In business communication, I was able to get what I “wanted” out of a cover letter or a memo or an email. I mastered the right level of audience focus, politeness and professionalism. Socioliguistics was a completely different game. I began to notice the nuances of both spoken and written language. I wrote a research character study of a character in the movie Dallas Buyers Club, making an argument about the Texan accent and its integration with the Southern drawl. The paper focused as narrow as particular vowel sounds used in this dialect of Southern American English. Through this balance of classes, I came to appreciate the value of having different lenses both an observer and writer.

Fast forward to first semester senior year. I was in the midst of my intense job search and flying out for consulting interviews every Friday. I was finishing up my business school curriculum and decided to take a course that would be much different to give myself a break from the quantitative, action-based business classes. My English 425: Advanced Essay Writing class last semester focused on immersion journalism. The class had less than 20 students and was my first exposure to this form of writing, which I grew to love. My focus in the class was to learn as much from my peers as I could while striving to become a better writer and challenge myself with different material and styles. I found that my peers, many of whom were aspiring journalists or well on their way in the field, helped me grow. I realized that a career in journalism is really interesting and intriguing to me and writing has since become a more important part of my life. In this community, I was a careful observer, critic, engaged listener and hard worker. I was more creative, less comfortable and willing to (even if maybe reluctantly) take risks with my writing. I put myself out there both as a person and as a writer. I wrote my first essay, a personal memoir, about my relationship with my sister over time. I learned how to integrate a recent experience, which was a conversation with my sister over coffee about our past, with flashbacks to stories from our childhood. In this essay, I opened myself up in ways that I had not before with writing: I was vulnerable, self-deprecating and raw. I wrote an essay about my relationship with my little sister; something I rarely share with others. I spent a weekend in my hometown revisiting a place where I took prom pictures and incorporated my previous personal experience at that place into a historical tour that ultimately became a story of memory and restoration.

The last step in my undergraduate writing curriculum is creating my final project for the Minor in Writing capstone course. From engaging in the genre of writing a curriculum and syllabus, I have realized the importance of being a detail-oriented writer: in these conventions, every word matters. I spent hours and hours getting the wording exactly right when writing my learning objectives and drafting the course description for my proposed elective. Instead of conducting academic research as I had in most of my previous writing pieces, I was reviewing my work with professionals in academia during in-person meetings. For this project, research became conversation.

The past four years have been a whirlwind, but I am proud to say I am graduating as a well-rounded, critical and engaged writer, thanks to the guidance I have had throughout the challenges of my academic career. Finally, I am not afraid to take risks, to write for different audiences or to challenge myself in unfamiliar subjects. As I enter the professional world this summer as a consultant, I know my work will continuously change. I have prepared myself for this dynamic career through my writing curriculum, and I look forward to whatever lies ahead.