At the beginning of my narrative medicine journey, I was tasked with writing a narrative essay describing a time in which I felt like an outcast. I immediately thought of this as an easy task. I assumed that writing about myself in the form of a story would be fairly simple. However, I soon discovered that this was no easy task. While I did not struggle with creating my outsider narrative, I struggled with containing it. I didn’t know how to keep the story I was telling from side tracking and straying away from the narrative I was trying to convey. This process left me with an essay that I felt had a very strong beginning but I felt like I had failed to connect my narrative to a cohesive message towards the end of the essay. The narrative essay taught me the importance of conciseness as an author. I realized that in order to clearly convey my piece’s purpose I had to find ways to shave off unnecessary details in my narrative. The narrative essay made me understand that adding “fluff” to my pieces doesn’t make them sound any more sophisticated, in fact, it does the opposite. Fluff muddles the purpose of my essay and distracts from its main purpose. The metaphor essay was the essay where I tried to remedy this issue. I tried to plan out the claims I would make in my essay, followed by evidence to support them. This aided in the overall conciseness of my essay as it allowed me to zoom in on the main ideas of the topic I chose, which was particularly helpful in the metaphor essay, as there were multiple topics to be discussed and compared with one another, unlike the narrative essay, which only dealt with one story and one message. This method of outlining my essay before I actually put it together, helped ease my overall writing process, as I found myself becoming less worried about the content of the essay and more about the structure of it; how to fit the pieces I had made fit in the best possible order. The process of writing the metaphor essay was also significant because it was the first time where I felt that the peer review process was effective in helping me improve my essay. The feedback I received from my peers was integral in helping me fine-tune and reshape the contents of writing piece. The peer review became one of the main pillars of my writing soon after, which aided me in the following critical lens essay. I began the critical lens essay with a crude outline of my basic claims along with evidence from various texts to support them. The peer review process allowed me to add more evidence to strengthen the claims I already made. The peer review process also helped me with reframing the structure of my essay. The outline helped with gathering content for the essay, but I still struggled with actually piecing the content together. The peer review was integral in helping overcome this because the outside opinion helped connect ideas together in ways that I initially did not think of. The critical lens essay also taught me how to properly utilize citations, a skill which become another pillar of my writing. The proper use of citations elevated my writing in the fact that I was able to incorporate other forms of evidence aside from text because I knew how to cite them. This use of new evidence became useful in my research paper, where I cited social media posts and movies to support my claims. Proper citation use was also utilized in other pieces of writing outside of FIQWS. A professionalism paper that I wrote for my freshman seminar class heavily utilized citations. My newfound knowledge of citations allowed me to streamline my essay by more fluidly incorporating textual evidence into my writing. The pillars of writing I have built throughout my experience in FIQWS class have transcended beyond academic writing. My informal free writing has also improved through my better understanding of how to construct a narrative. Even though informal writing pieces lack traditional elements of a narrative essay, when I go back to read them, I am able to remember exactly what I was thinking during the time of writing the piece due to my increased ability to tell stories.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
