Choosing to become an English major is terrifying. Growing up, all humanities are mocked as worthless and honestly, who decides to study language in college? Knowing how to combine letters into words that articulate certain meanings is, shockingly, a skill that is found everywhere. Even with this knowledge, I was scared to delve into a world of uncertainty where job security may not be so secure. Now, I feel like I can analyze the skills I have gathered and determine that I am a valuable asset to a company. By no means do I know everything, and I am excited to learn more, but what I have learned in my courses has provided me with what is necessary to begin a career. Years of researching, composing, and revising have shown me that being an English major and self-proclaimed rhetorician isn’t so bad after all.
After switching my major, one of the first courses I took was Business Writing with Professor (now Dr.) Diana Eidson. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this course when it began, but I was looking forward to learning about what I knew nothing of. In the beginning, I learned how to make a Prezi presentation. I was more than familiar with Powerpoint after grade school, and Prezi’s infinite white space of creativity was a whole new world to me. We worked on how to write different types of memos, reports, and how to write for a certain audience. The most valuable portion of this course came in two parts. An acronym called CRAP (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity) set the foundation of my abilities in document design. Thanks to that simple and memorable word, I was able to return to Business Writing to redesign a flyer in my Visual Rhetoric course.
The document I decided to showcase for Engl 3130 is my cover letter. Employers want to be impressed without searching through a sea of words, so I needed to be concise and sell myself. The letter I wrote expressed my enthusiasm for the company and position while providing an introduction and my notable skills. This letter became the basis for the cover letters that have helped me get internships at Creative Loafing and Atlanta Magazine.
Among my first courses stands Editing, or Engl 3140, a skill that all writers develop naturally. Through the writing process, one will revise their work and edit it in order to create a stronger work. However, being an editor is more than just revising an essay. There are style sheets that must be created and adhered too, there are proof letters that must be sent out, and there is a plethora of editorial marks that must be utilized to designate necessary corrections. In Dr. Bloom’s course, the main project was a 40-page HR how-to handbook. Each student received a copy of the book and needed to use copyeditor’s marks to suggest changes. We were instructed to not focus on content, but to keep his stylistic decisions congruent along with correct any grammatical errors. While I don’t have a copy of the handbook itself, the skills I learned with this project have poured into other assignments that I have completed.
For instance, we were given essays from other students to proofread and edit in this class. The instructions were to edit the paper, then create the included proof letter and style sheet that showed the author what I changed, what I suggested they change, and the style sheet allowed the author to show which stylistic rules I followed throughout the piece. While I have not utilized the actual marks recently, my attention to detail increased dramatically in this class. I am now more aware of the common and uncommon mistakes that people make in their papers, and I am more familiar with why things are wrong rather than simply knowing they are wrong.
While Editing required acute attention to detail, Practical Grammar was the most technical class I took in this concentration. In Dr. McLeod’s course, we studied the different types of words and how they fit into a sentence diagram. Most of this course was based around diagramming sentences so we could truly master how to organize a sentence. Initially, this was a simpler class with material that was easily comprehensible. Of course, that didn’t last and the sentences became longer and more complex. The document I am presenting is another sample of my editing through studying grammar on a precise level. Most of the work done in this course was on paper, but one of the final assignments was an edit of a previous work to showcase our newfound knowledge of grammar structure. I carefully considered how to edit my previous essays based on my new experience with sentence parts such as articles, prepositions, and adverbs in order to create a stronger paper.
My first CTW course at Georgia State was Engl 3050, where Dr. Lopez taught the class about Greek and Roman rhetoric. It was here that I began to collect a historical foundation of where language as a tool and art originated. I’ve been familiar with ethos, logos, and pathos since high school, but Aristotle and Plato still confused me. Between Dr. Lopez and The Rhetorical Tradition, I have gathered knowledge of ancient rhetoricians and their terms such as Aristotle, Cicero, the five canons, and the Sophists. One of the more major assignments in this course was the annotated bibliography, in which we were told to research scholarly and academic sources that provided information about rhetoric. I decided to find sources on visual rhetoric, and discovered that it was prominent since Aristotle, through the 15th century, and how it has been adapted into the modern world. I’ve always been skeptical about basing an entire field on one person or group. However, the more I study rhetoric the more I find that we still rely on the skills provided by the ancient rhetoricians.
Later in my career as a student I took Dr. Burmester’s Expository Writing course. I’ve always loved travel, and the thought of journeying across the world and writing about it excites me. After signing up for this course, I discovered that it was focused on travel writing. Before writing our first essay, our class had been studying style through travel writers such as Bill Bryson. Bryson has a distinct voice that expresses his humor to keep the reader engaged and eager to digest the large amounts of information he tends to provide. After reading a piece of his on the Appalachian Trail, I wanted to mimic his writing in a piece that wasn’t quite ghost writing. I didn’t want his voice, but rather my own voice that engaged the reader in a similar fashion. I spent my time with this essay determining not only what I wanted to writing but exactly how I wanted to write it. I knew I had to revise my piece for a particular audience. This wasn’t simply an academic essay, I wanted to the common reader to enjoy it. The end result was a piece that is not only informative, but there is a strong flow that moves the reader from each section while keep a conversational tone that doesn’t ruin the informative backbone.
During these past few years, I’ve learned a lot about myself. I’ve improved my own writing, I’ve learned the history of rhetoric, and I’ve learned techniques of how to present a message. What I was not prepared to learn was the literacy narrative of another person. Going into this degree, I never expected to study a regular person. Obviously, I was planning on studying famous rhetoricians and authors throughout time, but not another common person. This is exactly what happened when I signed up for a Topics course over literacy narratives with Dr. Michael Harker. After discovering that this class was “his baby,” I expected to uncover the secrets of literacy and exactly what that word means. Everybody began the course with the impression that literacy is, of course, the ability to read and write. There just so happens to be much more to literacy than I previously imagined.
After compiling research from a database known as the Digital Archives of Literacy Narratives (DALN), we were required to find stories of people who had been impacted by literacy, what literacy is to them, and why it is important personally. We kept an eye out for literacy sponsors, or the entity guiding the narrator through literacy. I discovered that while people generally defined literacy as reading and writing, it bled into many of these people’s lives in ways I hadn’t imagined before. The most striking story I read was of a girl with Asperger’s who said she was addicted to reading. She claimed that reading stories would activate all of her cognitive senses and that she was practically transported into the world she was reading about.
Once the research was complete, we shared this information in a short, two pages essay that was later grown into a larger six page paper. In the end, I learned that literacy is more than reading and writing. I learned that literacy is an entity that can be self-taught, shared, and utilized as a tool to enhance one’s life. Unfortunately, not everyone shared the same love of literacy. Some people aren’t able to obtain this luxury and their lack of literacy skills actually inhibit their ability to succeed in the world. If anything was obtained during this semester, I believe Dr. Harker wanted it to be that literacy is much more than reading and writing. On top of that, I honed my research abilities and explored multiple perspectives on this topic.
Once I decided to change my major to English, I began to learn more and more about the world of writing. I learned mostly about myself and who I am in order to express myself in my writing. My seminar course has helped me identify and build on my own voice as we have studied style. I’m taking a course to further my knowledge in visual rhetoric so I can be viable in a wide variety of communication. Throughout the past few years, I have gathered knowledge such as proper grammar, rhetorical history and application, composition, and revision. I have developed a love for the Oxford comma, style, and finding my own voice. Thanks to these new abilities, I have been able to enjoy an internship at Creative Loafing and another at Atlanta Magazine. Looking at the future, I feel confident that I will overcome the stereotype that English majors can’t find successful careers in their field.
Word Document of Senior Exit Essay
Portfolio Essay
Documents
Engl 3130 with Diana Eidson
Cover Letter
Engl 3140 with Dr. Bloom
Proof Letter Style Sheet
Engl 3105 with Dr. McLeod
Essay Topic 4 (Satire) – Edited for Grammar
Engl 3050 with Dr. Lopez
Midterm Terms
Engl 3090 with Dr. Burmester
Essay #2 – Appalachian Trail
Engl Topics 4200 with Dr. Harker
DALN DALN 2