Growing up, I would dread having to write essays in my classes. I would treat rough drafts as completely optional and the assignment as a challenge of simply meeting a word count. I remember being introduced to the MLA format of essays in eighth grade and being taught it was the revolutionary, all-telling mechanism for essay writing. I, along with my classmates, used this format all throughout high school. I got decent at writing these five paragraph essays structurally, but that was about it. My writing lacked depth and my AP Language Arts teacher was quick to challenge me forward. I remember being frustrated by her frequent “and what about it?” comments on my essay drafts. In our class she instilled the importance of writing with a purpose and I am forever grateful for her guidance. I slowly started to break away from my mechanic approach to writing and started to answer those “and what about it” questions in my writing. I began no longer writing to meet word counts, but also to derive a deeper understanding and fruitful observations of what I was writing about.    

 

Nonetheless, I do not enjoy writing simply to write. My experiences growing up, from being the child of immigrants to working in public service, have informed both why I think writing is important and what I am interested in writing about. In the next few sentences I will explain how those two things relate; I promise this relates to my fully realized project, so it will be worthwhile. 

 

I think writing is important because information is the single most important thing, aside from personal experience, to help us make sense of the world around us and, more importantly, how we could work towards a more just one for all. And in my view, the world we live in is in dire need of active and restorative justice. We only know what is available to us through communication and there is so much information yet to be tapped into for our access. Communication whether that be written, spoken, or symbolic, is the bread and butter of writing. We write to communicate. Therefore, access to information requires active forms of communication: translating to an abundance of writing. What I am interested in writing stems from getting to this realization a few years back. To put it excruciating vaguely, I am interested in writing about histories not largely tapped into or swept under the rug as a result of the eurocentric writing of history we have been predisposed to in the West. Through this, I hope to contribute to efforts of restorative justice and the dismantling of systems that harm us. A lot, I know, but with access to the right tools, one step at a time, I think we could make a real difference.      

 

This brings me to the discussion you’ve all been waiting for: my writing process for this portfolio. In no way divorced from my passion for free access to information, my topic revolves around the media landscape in Iraq during and after the Baath regime. The quest for free access to information is immensely threatened by overt state control over the media. In all my experiments, and subsequently my final piece, I was hoping to preserve information. In the interviews, I hoped to preserve the experiences of the individuals. My op-ed piece is an attempt to illustrate the ways access to information can be threatened and how navigating a media landscape post complete state control has its own sets of difficulties. I’ve approached structuring this e-portfolio as a digital archive of sorts in an effort to illustrate the essence of the op-ed (my fully-realized project) and make the experience of navigating it more interactive.           

 

There are a number of works that have spoken volumes to me and contributed to my perception of our world. All these works were efficiently and purposefully communicated, elements I see as crucial to the dissemination of information in an impactful way. Writing is always a work in progress and that is something I learned while working on this portfolio. Review and reflection are the most integral parts of the writing process. I strive to reach the quality level of my favorite pieces and look forward to continuing down my journey of self-improvement in writing.