Writing

Selected works from 2016-2020

• Political Science Piece:

After three and a half years of reading Political Science academic articles, it finally came time to write my own. The capstone seminar class for the Political Science major requires students to apply a scholarly argument related to enfranchisement or disenfranchisement to a contemporary voting rights issue of the students choice. I chose to focus my own research on vote-by-mail, a topic which I knew very little about at the onset. Specifically, I focused on the roll of party building in the passage of Ballot Measure 60 in the State of Oregon, which made Oregon the first state to use vote-by-mail as the primary method of voting across all elections. Countless hours of digging through 1998 Oregon newspapers later, and I am proud to present my own original research.

• Revision Piece:

Throughout my undergraduate career, an overwhelming majority of my writing was for an academic audience. Rarely did I have the challenge of writing for a popular audience. When the Writing capstone class tasked me with revising a piece to fit a new genre, I knew right away what I wanted to do. This was the perfect opportunity to venture into a genre that had always fascinated me, yet I had no experience in: newspaper opinion articles. I selected a policy brief that I had written for an introductory writing class, and set out to erase that boring academic jargon, and replace it with some front page worthy content. Below is my article titled "Opinion: The Stealth Enemy in California’s Housing Crisis: Airbnb" followed by the original policy brief for context.

• Applied Piece:

I took Memoir and Personal writing because it made it possible to stack my schedule to only have classes Tuesday and Thursday. My desire to ski 5 days aways outweighed my crippling fear of talking about my personal life. I figured I have had a pretty uneventful life, what could I possibly write a memoir about? My idea of what a memoir could be was quickly shattered. I quickly realized I was stuck in that class 4 hours a week, and there was no getting out of it without talking about my personal life at least a little bit. I took my first real attempts at any kind of creative writing, and I slowly came out of my shell a little and wrote the following piece which I (nervously) present.

• WRIT 200 Piece:

When tasked with writing a creative nonfiction piece for my WRIT 2000 class, I was confused to say the least. My academic writing for political science was based in presenting objective facts to make arguments. My only creative writing experience was in memoir writing. A Creative nonfiction didn't fit any of the boxes that I categorized writing into. Many revisions later, I finally came around to this new box, the creative nonfiction.

• Analysis Piece:

For this assignment, I reflected on a piece which I had written for a history class. The reflection is included below, followed by the original piece.

• Theory Piece:

My final piece comes from my "Landmarks in Rhetorical Theory Class" Half of the class was tasked with watching the 1960 Nixon v Kennedy debate, while the other half was tasked to listening to the radio recording of the same debate. I fell into the half who watched the debate. This was a exercise in examining rhetorical situations, and how they change across mediums.