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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Links to all of my personal blog posts are listed below: