written work

The following three papers were written as the result of a Rhetoric and Civic Engagement course at the University of Central Florida. The first paper served to state my research proposal, where I identified a problem in my community and listed ways in which I would go on to research the social reality of the issue. You can catch a glimpse of my stance on the issue beginning with the title "Hemp: the Villainized Supercrop". I felt that it was a visually rhetorical way to get the readers mentally ready for the level of corruption involved around a plant. That which has been proven useful to homo sapiens from the time that they first began traveling the Earth.

My decision for choosing this community issue came from my knowledge of the war on drugs. The harmful impact that this movement has had on generations of civilians since its inception are far-reaching and still felt today. Hemp, cannabis sativa, is by no means referred to as a 'drug' and has absolutely no psychoactive effects. Nonetheless it was banned altogether back in the 1930s because it was identified as the same thing as cannabis indica, better known as marijuana. The war on drugs gave way to my project as I attempted to rectify the status that the plant once had in society.

The questions that prompted the paper below were "What is your definition of art? Under that definition, how can video games be considered art?". This was also the prompt that allowed me to realize that writing might actually be enjoyable. As I was writing this paper I saw myself building sentences upon each other to the point where, for the first time in my writing history, I had to limit myself because of length constraints. It was as if I had been living with writers block my whole life and had finally found the key to thinking creatively. I was inspired by the prompt and subject matter to such an extent that I felt I had enough context to fill a book.