​

​

I have always had a cockiness complex about my writing. In third grade Myles Tang and I used to compete for who did the best on our vocab tests and throughout middle and high school, I was highly unsatisfied if I received any grade less than an A. I wasn’t so great with numbers or understanding the elements of the periodic table but my consistent praise from my teachers was that I was a very good writer. Just like my mom. I came in to college very confident. That is, until I got my first English 124 Comparative Literature essay back from my GSI. There were very minimal comments about rhetoric, but across my conclusion and intro the same phrase was written largely in bright red pen: “Dig DEEPER.” I got a B+.

​

I was crushed. I was frustrated with my teacher, with myself, and sat at my desk in a daze, wondering what this seemingly evil comment meant. Did dig deeper mean that my paper was only a surface level analysis? Did my B+ mean that because I had not dug deep my teacher didn't care about any of my evidence or great flow or clear organization? What the f*** could she mean by this? I called my mom, angry, explaining to her what happened. She told me to first of all calm down, and that one B+ did not mean I was a bad writer. Instead, she told me, sometimes, even though your paper might be “good,” there is a deeper level that you didn't even touch, and it seems as if my teacher thought there was in this essay, and that she would have liked me to explore that level further.

 

I reflected back on the compare-contrast essay, whose thesis was this:“Although the main characters differ in personality, background, geographic location, and time period in which they lived, these novels illuminate how mobility encourages all children and adolescents to mature in a way that would not be possible had they stayed in the comfort of their homes.”

 

A thesis that I thought was lean and mean at the time, I now realized could have been much stronger had I recognized the important differences between the two books. How did gender or socioeconomic status play into mobility? Was the difference in the type of mobility between the two characters important? While I certainly pondered those things at the time, I had been taught to value simplicity of argument over introducing factors that might confuse it. Now I was being told to confuse it, and to confuse it greatly.

 

As I ventured into my second English class, English 225, which was focused greatly on learning how to write a kick ass argument, I got similar feedback from my teacher about a critical review essay, but this time her big red letters spelled “SO WHAT?” Again my ego was at stake.

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

​

 

My conclusion was: “Kolker persuades his reader that the corrupt values of academic institutions mirror corrupt societal values and that in general, prestigious institutions care more about the number of students going to Harvard than the number of students who used illegal measures to get there.”

 

In this instance, I definitely was able to dig deeper, and analyze the problem as larger than just students cheating in school, but rather, as their cheating being reflective of illicit measures being used among influential members of society. However, as my favorite English professor once said, I did not tell my readers why any of this mattered. What did this mean for the future of integrity? Of testing? Of Wall Street? Of The White House? All of these questions could have been analyzed in my conclusion, but although I was no longer just skimming the surface, I wasn’t quite getting at the big picture yet either.

​

I entered my sophomore year, with the “so what?” question probing my brain and decided to try to answer it in a new way that leant to more creativity than in my traditional coursework. I figured that I’d take a stab at publishing the type of writing I had been scribbling in journals stashed in my bedside table since I was nine—personal writing about everything and anything I was thinking about that week. I started writing for a Greek online publication called The Odyssey about topics that I had always contemplated, and thought that my fellow twentysomethings may have contemplated at some time or another as well. I wrote about the female phenomenon of passive aggression, the struggles of feelings of inadequacy in the job process, and the stresses of college hookup culture: I published some words that I had always thought would remain in the confines of my bedside table, and honestly, it was empowering. My words were flowing so naturally about these topics, because the subjects I covered were essentially what was going on in my life and I was able to “dig deep,” and answer the “so what?” that I had struggled to answer in academic papers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In an article I titled “The Verdict on Cheating,” I wrote: “We are quick to judge those who stay with “cheaters” as lacking self-respect. But after observing a variety of different cheating situations, I think that a “never ever” policy might be oversimplified. So before you judge Hilary Clinton as weak, its important to remember that although we feel personally offended by Bill's slimy philandering, we were not in the room with Hil and Bill after the fact, and we simply aren’t in a position to judge their relationship.”

           

Maybe it was a drive to produce honest and engaging content, or perhaps it was the pressure of writing for a wider audience, or not writing for the grade, but my ability to push beyond the surface of a subject, leave room for further discussion and leave my Odyssey pieces without an ultimatum really helped refine and nuance my approach. I was now thinking like a journalist. A type of thinking that would be essential for writing papers in my major, which is the closest thing to a journalism major here at Michigan: Communication Studies.

 

A self-proclaimed writer, I came into college declaring to my friends and family that I would be an English major. English was always my strongest subject, and I had always equated my affinity for writing with the genre. However, my eyes were opened to a subject that went beyond the analysis of novels when I took my first introductory Communications course.

 

I was suddenly asked to think about movies, television shows, campaign ads as well as popular commercials as a part of the larger sphere of popular culture and the values these texts, and pop culture promoted. I was hooked. Rather than simply finding textual evidence to support my analysis of The Catcher and The Rye, I was analyzing media effects of television shows that I actually watched, and how they have impacted my worldview. We were given terms like hegemony, power structure, patriarchy and hetero-normativity and asked to analyze different texts in different mediums using these lenses. At first, we were given more straightforward prompts, and daunted by the complexities of the texts I had chosen, I often chose to argue that a text either did or did not reinforce patriarchal/hetero-normative (etc.) ideas. 

​

However, growing tired of this simplified argument, and pushed by my professors, I came to realize that just arguing that a text promotes one value or counters it is not enough, but rather, it is recognizing the nuances in a piece, and how it plays into a greater conversation that leads to a stronger and more thorough argument.

In an upper level communications course I was asked to blog about the male gaze and its appearance in a pop culture text of our choice. I chose to analyze Beyoncé’s drunk in love music video:

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

​

“From Mulvey’s perspective, Beyoncé’s sexualized portrayal serves to reinforce patriarchal ideology through the two looks of both the camera and the audience that are focused on her body. However, due to Beyoncé’s fierceness and the lack of an active male gazer, the video invites a gaze that might have been unimaginable for Mulvey in the 1970s, an active female gaze that appreciates her sexuality as empowering rather than objectifying.”

           

In this post, I took what I had learned from writing my Odyssey articles and allowed for a sort of open-endedness to my argument. It would definitely have been easier for me to argue one way or another, in this instance, I knew that that analysis would not do justice to the complex nature of the music video.

​

Similarly, last semester in my capstone course, my final paper was to analyze a phenomenon using the lens of theories of misinformation: I chose perhaps one of the most controversial court cases of all time: The O.J. Simpson trial. This analysis was complex and nuanced and touched upon all of the conflicting information in order to argue the variety of outcomes, positive and negative, that resulted from the trial. It was the advice from my freshman English teachers, my venture into creative writing, and my trial and errors with a number of Comm analysis papers that allowed me the courage to venture into this crazy topic, and do justice to the multitude of layers it encompassed.

 

While a B+ on my first college paper was certainly a blow to my self-esteem if I were to re-grade it now I would give myself a C. As good as I was at writing a mean introductory sentence, at organizing my thoughts, at tying it all together at the end, being driven to think bigger is what made me into the writer I am today. And my persistent need to answer “so what?” question is what has driven me to pursue a career in journalism. One day, when I am out there writing for Vogue and interviewing Selena Gomez, asking her all of the right, hard-hitting questions, I owe it all to my first English professors here at Michigan: Melisa Gelinás, and Gail Gibson and their mean, ego-shattering red pens.