Our first assignment was to repurpose a past writing piece that we had created. This writing piece could be ANYTHING. It could be a paragraph-long email, or it could be a 20 page thesis. Our only real requirement was that somehow we had to make it different (different audience, slightly different subject matter, different genre, whatever).
I decided to rework a piece that I did last year (sophomore year) in English 325 on my relationship with my sister, Julia. The piece was originally a creative nonfiction memoir-type deal about how our relationship changed over time. My repurposed piece is still creative nonfiction, I would say, but the subject matter is not just me and Julia anymore. I decided to throw my other sister, Clare, into the deal.
You can check it out here.
Our second major assignment was to take our repurposed piece and keep the same audience, but change something else major about it--i.e. genre. Basically, since I had written a creative nonfiction piece, I couldn't just write another creative nonfiction piece but about another story or chunk of my life. Nope. I had to do something radically different.
I feel as though a couple examples of what past & present students have done might help you all understand just how crazy we were expected to go. One of the girls that I worked with this semester did her repurposed piece on a series of blog posts of the female body image. Her remediated piece was a recreated Cosmo cover--but her new cover was advocating for great sunscreen brands and how to learn to love your body. One person that we looked at as a class had their original repurposed piece on Hillary Clinton and how she chose to run her campaign. His remediated piece was a podcast where he interviewed women on how they felt about the female voice in politics--their feelings on Clinton, especially.
This was probably the part that I struggled with the most. Here I was in a writing class, and I was being told that I could do something that barely involved writing. It was hard to wrap my head around. But, somehow, I managed. What I ended up coming up with was a series of illustrations on my relationships with my three younger sisters. IMPORTANT: These illustrations are not meant to be read as a story, but instead as a group of sister-relationship illustrations. Yes, they all have the same characters, but I want them to all be able to stand on their own.
You can check them out here.
My peers and I also kept a joint blog of our journey through the writing minor, which you can check out here.
Links to all of my personal blog posts are listed below: