I took Advanced Composition with Dr. Lindsay Harding during the second semester of my Freshman year. My goal by joining this class was to refine my writing process, to learn how to improve my general writing style (for narrative and academic purposes), and to understand how to structure my writing for different scenarios. This class taught me not only these skills, but also how I could be conscientious of my writing process and how I could transfer my skills across multiple genres.
“An Investigation into the Core Traits of the Western Genre” was one of the academic essays that I wrote for the class. As the title, my intention was to investigate the Western as a genre and to determine – with a consideration to its international iterations and generic combinations – what qualities truly constituted it.
It may seem strange to begin my journey as a narrative writer with an academic essay; however, this essay incorporated key skills that I later used across my work. I had to investigate the work of other scholars, not just for the content of their essays, but also for the language and style of those essays. I had to format and write my research paper as though I were going to send it to another scholar. I think I break down my position well overall, and I believe that I communicated my point in terms best suited for this kind of discourse. Looking back, I think I could have afforded to use less passive voice in my essay. While I do not believe passive voice is absolutely improper for an analytical essay, using active voice would have tightened some of the passages.
Though it is only seven pages, I couldn’t simply finish this paper in an afternoon. A significant amount of research needed to be involved, and the paper was subject to several revisions. I was surprised by how difficult it was to define the Western, and how quite loose our idea of genre is. Learning about the ways that genres are re-interpreted and are intersected with other genres opened my eyes to how my own work didn’t have to be bound by the restrictions of a single genre. Writing this piece also showed me how I could adapt to the demands of a writing form, like that of a research paper. By the end of this class, I learned how to be more adaptable as a writer, which became essential to my work in my future classes.