From an early age, I have always loved the beautiful and meticulous art of writing. What I am unable to articulate in words, I can eloquently craft onto paper. While some people may find nature, sports, fashion, or artwork to be beautiful, I find the right arrangement of words to be incredibly gorgeous. I write down everything. Literally everything. I prefer notebooks to laptops, and sticky notes to text messages. I makes lists of funny quotes my friends have said, recipes I tell myself I’m going to try, books to share with friends, cities I hope to visit, and moments in vivid dreams I’ve had. I write because it is cathartic and a great organizational tool for me to order the thousands of thoughts running through my head. While lists help keep me organized, journals and notebooks have really been the root of my inspiration for my magazine and academic writing.

My debut as a critical writer came in the 5^th grade when I wrote an argumentative essay on why I thought the constitution was outdated and unimportant. Not so surprisingly, I was the only one out of 52 5^th graders who held this belief, so my teacher made me read it in front of the entire class. While everyone laughed as I argued that laws written in the 17^th century should have no bearing on lawmaking today, I still held firm in my belief for a few years after this.

My 5^th grade teacher, who I am still in contact with today, was the first adult in my life who acknowledged my skill with words and encouraged me to practice writing outside of the classroom. In middle school, I wrote for various online blogs and attended a few summer writer workshops. A defining moment in my early development as a writer came in the 8^th grade when my essay on, “What Westland Middle School Taught Me,” won our school-wide contest and was selected be to read out loud at 8^th grade graduation. I clearly remember standing on a podium that one day in June, speaking into a microphone that was positioned slightly too high for me, in front of a room full of 800 sweaty parents and awkward 14-year-olds in Nordstrom Rack sundresses and tightly buttoned collared shirts. One joke I made about the Vice Principal got such a rise out of the audience, the principal had to grab the microphone to tell everyone to be quiet, so I could finish my speech. My parents were so thrilled that I had finally taken interest in something outside of my schoolwork that they decided to capitalize on this event and paid for me to attend a two-week writing camp that summer. My middle school graduation gift. The camp was held in the same school my grandmother taught in Virginia Beach, so I was happy to be carted off to a two-week vacation at the beach with no parents. While the only writing I produced that summer was a graphic novel about a washed-up mermaid, I did enjoy endless amounts of Dairy Queen trips with my grandfather and afternoons spent tanning near the boardwalk.

In high school, I wrote for my school’s award-winning newspaper, The Tattler, and served as a feature editor for two years. I continued my journalistic writing even through college as I wrote and edited articles for the online magazine, Her Campus, for four years and served as the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) during my senior year. This is one of my proudest accomplishments to date because during my time as EIC, I was able to grow the organization to 45 writers, 60 staff members, 10 exec board leaders, and gain a readership of hundreds of students, both on and off Wake’s campus. Writing has not only served as a creative outlet, but it has also helped me gain friendships, work through difficult times in my life, connect with others, and leave an impact on my wonderful alma mater.

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Throughout my four years as a student at Wake Forest University, I have engaged in many discourse communities with various leadership positions. Swales defines a discourse community as any group with a broadly agreed upon set of public goals, mechanics of intercommunication among its members, and genre use to provide feedback and further its aims. While my BEM major has given me a general set of technical skills necessary to engage in the professional business community, it has been my time as an interdisciplinary writing minor and Editor-in-Chief for Her Campus that has helped me discover my flexible and engaging writing persona.

My friends, family, and colleagues say that I am an extremely adaptable person, and the same can be said about my writing. Through the practice of writing for different audiences, discourse communities, professors, and purposes, I have become an adaptable writer who is able to incorporate various opinions or bodies of research to produce conversational pieces. In my journalism courses, I developed the ability to take my own opinion out of a story or topic and allow the reader to come to their own conclusion based on the evidence I have provided. Conversely, in my essay-writing classes and time spent writing opinion pieces for news articles, I learned to connect personal experience to larger social issues and relevant political events. Furthermore, being a BEM major and a board member for the School of Business taught me how to write clearly and concisely in order to transmit objectives, feedback, and announcements in an effective and timely manner. While my business courses were not as writing intensive as my writing minor courses, writing assignments in my business classes taught me the importance of choosing my words carefully and using different communication channels to express intent (i.e. presentations vs. emails vs. memos).

In my writing minor studies, I learned two of the important aspects to consider when becoming an engaged writer are audience and tone. Knowing my audience is a skill I especially honed in on as I transitioned from my general liberal arts classes to my genre specific business courses. By reading newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal and receiving feedback from my business professors, I was able to modify my often lengthy and “flowery” writing into more concise business writing. Furthermore, from my involvement with different discourse communities both on and off campus, I learned to tailor my syntax and lexicon in order to communicate to a wide variety of audiences. Also, the two years I worked as a magazine editor made me keenly aware of English grammar and mechanics. Many of my friends will even ask me to read over their essays or important emails because they know I have an eye for grammatical errors.

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The following portfolio is comprised of my pivotal writing accomplishments in my undergraduate career. I have included analytical essays I completed for my English courses, a lengthy research paper on human trafficking policy in third world countries, an article I published on HerCampus.com, a reflection paper from my internship class, and several personal essays I wrote for my writing minor courses. These pieces showcase my ability to cover a wide variety of topics and address different audiences. Arranged in three sections distinguishing my journalistic, academic, and creative writing, readers will be able to see the transition in my writing style from flowery and objective to concise and subjective. One of my major struggles as a writer is writing in a clear and concise manner. I tend to use long-winded sentences to make my points. However, after receiving feedback from professors and paying closer attention to my diction and syntax, I minimized my use of adverbs and eliminated unnecessary modifiers to present my arguments in a succinct and persuasive manner.

Another major marker in my writing development is my increased use of first person to establish a confident stance. In my high school courses and many of the 100 level required classes I took in the first two years of college, my teachers/professors always discouraged the use of first person. Using first person pronouns is considered inappropriate in many academic disciplines, such as the hard sciences, psychology, political science, and English, especially for research publications and scholarly journals. However, as I became more comfortable in my voice and persona, I began to use “I” more frequently to establish an assertive stance in my argument papers. In my earlier assignments, such as my DSP essay and FYS final paper, I used a lot of hedging language such as “perhaps,” “assuming,” and “suggesting.” In my later papers, I use fewer hedges and instead use stance markers, including “conversely,” “nevertheless,” and “furthermore,” to compare perspectives and put my views in conversation with previous opinions or understandings.

Furthermore, my ability to dissect and interpret the writings of others is a common theme present throughout my portfolio. Specifically, in a case study completed for a writing and rhetoric course, I analyze the writing development of a novice sociology professor. I point out how her positioning as a writer and use of hedges indicate her transition from hesitant PhD candidate to a confident associate professor at Wake Forest. This was the first time I was asked to closely analyze syntax, verbiage and structure, so this process helped me to identify and understand stance markers within my own writing. While writing about writing can be a challenging task, it is essential for writers to reflect on the writing process itself in order to become an efficient communicator.

In reflection of my undergraduate writing career, I used my skill of writing to generate conversation with peers and teachers, help others develop their own writing, and share news and information through various news outlets and blogs. Transitioning into the professional world, I realize that my writing will serve different purposes, including sharing information with coworkers, communicating with clients, and taking down notes in meetings. While I will no longer be writing articles for a college magazine or lengthy essays and analysis papers for professors in the professional world, I hope to continue to practice this art and someday publish a novel. I hope you enjoy the following portfolio as it showcases decisive writing moments in my undergraduate career and my overall development into an adaptable and engaging writer. I also want to thank my 5^th grade teacher for encouraging me to pursue this passion and to not be afraid to voice my opinions, even if they are as outlandish as claiming that the US Constitution is irrelevant to modern lawmaking. Thank you to my undergraduate professors who gave me detailed and honest feedback on my writing assignments and took genuine interest in my writing development. Thank you to my parents and friends who helped me edit final drafts, listened as I read essays out-loud late at night, and helped me overcome frustrating periods of writer’s block. Without this support system, I would not have been able to compose the following portfolio.