The Start Result
All throughout school we’ve been trained to write with authority, to eliminate passive voice, to start with a riveting intro, three solid yet different body paragraphs, and a clinching conclusion. The beauty of the IP, yes, beauty of the dreaded IP, is that answering the seemingly shallow question, “Who are you?” turns out to be much harder than I thought. Who am I? I’m supposed to complete an entire project with this prompt? Where are my guidelines, criteria, and graphic organizers? That’s when I realized the purpose of the IP: to push ourselves to become our own writers, to challenge ourselves to produce original thought, and to strip away the strategic process work, leaving our audience with a voice none other than our own.
While my transformation into an independent, signature writer is yet to be completed, or even close to it, each piece that I’ve included has challenged me to access a different part of my writing-brain, a different tone, a different angle, even a different person. And while it seems that all of these new-found vehicles of writing fail to relate to each other in the slightest, they all contribute to the experimentation of creating MY writing. This is certainly not the end result or the shimmering finish line of my efforts in Honors English III, but rather the “starting result” of my attempts to stimulate my process of becoming a writer.
Whether I am analyzing the truths to be found in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, reporting on the mob activities of Al Capone, or floating the Mississippi with Huck Finn, this project is a collection of personalities, voices, mind-sets, nuances, of me.
