The Pitfalls of Perseverance
Throughout my academic career I’ve had a tendency to take challenges with assignments head on and brunt through obstacles and opposition. People often admire this quality of perseverance, even encourage it. It’s a highly sought after leadership trait, one that every parent hopes to instill in their child. So thank you for that one, mom and dad. But throughout this past semester, I’ve come to realize that in some cases, perseverance is, for lack of a better word, dumb. These past four months have taught me that you shouldn’t struggle through one idea just because it's your first. This type of perseverance is limiting. Instead, I’ve learned to experiment with my writing.
That experimentation started with with a tweet. 6 words. “It’s dark outside and I’m sad.” I was told to pick an original piece to modify. Notes from an internship, an open letter, an email, maybe a poem? Really, pick anything.
My professor challenged us to use a tweet. I used a tweet. Quite original.
Week two: I was supposed to think about genre. Think about it. Honestly, I had never thought about genre and what implications different genres had. Genre depends on audience? Or does audience depend on genre? I have to think about my audience before I actually write for them? There are TWO audiences?? Truly, we were speaking a different language to me. I used to sit at my desk, open my laptop, set my font to Arial, size to 12, and remind myself to not forget to double space. Now here we were: a classroom of 15 talking about rhetorical situations. Was I supposed to learn that in English 125? Do I even belong here? A scheduling mix up, a fluke in the application process? I was alone struggling with these new thoughts. We hadn’t even started writing, just thinking.
And that thinking about writing got me thinking. Why am I thinking about thinking about writing? Are we just complicating everything? Why does everything have to be such a process? Let’s all open our notebooks and get to modifying that original piece, shall we? And so, to modify that original piece I did the most unoriginal thing I have quite possibly ever done. I turned a tweet into a diary. Twitter: basically an online diary entry shortened to 140 characters. The same thoughts, just longer. Wow. Good one, Ashley. Really pushing the limits there, huh? And I justified it by saying I narrowed the audience from my followers to just myself. A real big modification.
When my peers politely questioned its rhetorical situation, and my feedback detailed that I lacked any formal research, I still told myself I would obviously fully realize this first experiment by the end of the semester. Bad feedback? Persevere. First idea, best idea. The others are just going to be formalities, assignments that I would need to pass the class.
And so the formality came: experiment two. What to do, what to do? Ashley, you already have your final project, so let’s do something drastic. Something you hate. Let’s do a research paper. Or better yet, a literary review of other scientific papers. Then, you’ll have to read a lot and write a lot. But, don’t worry; just a formality. And boy do I thank god that I was set on that diary entry because that paper sucked. My professor didn’t even know it was a scientific literary review. How does that happen? There was borderline plagiarism on my outline. How does that happen? Well, probably a combination of no forethought and negative afterthought. That could definitely do it. My stubborn perseverance still told me to stick with experiment one.
I was on thin ice. So, when experiment three came around I knew I had to step my game up; number three could not just be a formality. I started thinking about my audience and who I was trying to grab by the shoulders, shake them, and look in their eyes for them to have this grand realization. What realization did I want them to have? Whose shoulders did I want to reach out for? The concept of love and heartbreak is such a transcendent topic that I wanted to have as large of an audience, with the same cultural background as me, as possible. That audience, I thought, could be reached through a newspaper: The New York Times. Credible, wide-reaching, and committed to spreading the truth. And that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to tell the truth about heartbreak, to explain the emotional effects but also shed light to the physical conditions that can occur. No one talks about it aside from scientific papers, which we can all agree I’m not suited to write. And even if I were, I don’t think my intended audience would be receptive to that genre. They needed a middle ground between experiment one and two, something eye-catching and balanced, something capable of telling both sides of the story, something worth reading. For the first time, I was thinking about genre and audience, and how they interconnected to demand unique rhetoric.
My desire to persevere with experiment one burst. I was getting somewhere, somewhere meaningful with my writing. But, how do I put pen to paper? I decided on a graphic: think one panel comic strip minus the humor, think infographic stripped of the dozens of statistics. Eye-catching? Check. And so, I doodled; all the while I was thinking of the conventions of my genre, keeping most and discarding some, to suit my audience and my message. My process was amended and adapted several times by where I wanted my audience to see this. The comic section? Too informal, not enough credibility. A stand alone piece? Not enough information. Finally I settled on an accompaniment to an op-ed piece. I created the piece with the ability to read in print, online, or on a mobile device because I really enjoy reading selected pieces on The Times through Snapchat. Everything had forethought: every font, every word, every outline and stroke of the pen. They were all meaningful, as writing should be.
And the product? Well, you’ve already seen it on my Home page. Take a look. Then, get a glimpse of my process, the development of my experiments. Find the sketch drafts and the sample excerpts. I’m sure you’ll see the unoriginality of experiment one and the it’s-just-a-formality attitude I took on for experiment two. You’re most likely glad that I didn’t persevere. And I can only hope that experiment three shows my growth and the cultivation of a semester of learning to think again.
I think that the higher education culture currently asks so much of its students that, under the many time constraints from various classes, we tend to just complete assignments. There is no forethought, nor any afterthought. Just get it done and move on to the next one. Writing followed this process for me. One essay down, three more to go. Introduction, body, conclusion. Done. I found that it wasn’t my writing that was poor (although it is sometimes rough around the edges), but my process and my tendency to persevere held me back. This class didn’t just teach me to write, those fundamentals were grasped throughout grade school. It taught me how to think about my writing. And when I’ve thought long and hard, to question it, and think a new thought. And I have a lot more thinking to do. This isn’t the finished product; believe me, we’re still experimenting.