Writing 20 Theatre: Verbatim/Verboten has been much more than a class. It has been a journey; a discovery of myself as a writer. Through the course of the class, I have discovered some the subjects that I feel most passionately about. Finding this passion is crucial to my writing’s improvement. In addition to this passion, the three tools that I have found to be most significant in my own writing are personal bias, personal writing style, and drafting.
Personal bias sets the tone for any piece. Every work of writing, especially that of the documentary genre, has a certain history behind it. The writer’s personal bias helps mold the piece in a way unlike any other; it offers a truly unique perspective on the subject matter. Strong, clear personal bias is crucial to good writing because good writing involves rhetoric that offers a fresh perspective to its subject matter. This course has taught me the importance of being able to put my personal bias down on paper in relation to writing profoundly.
While personal bias accounts for the perspective on the writing topic, personal writing style accounts for the way in which this perspective is presented to the piece’s audience. Personal writing style is: “it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it.” I have learned that the writing style should reflect the purpose of the piece. Earlier this semester, I attempted to write on the horrors of high school violence. Looking back and analyzing my writing now, I realize that the reason that my piece was not as successful as it could have been was that my word choice did not reflect these ‘horrors’; it was too passive to make a profound impact on my audience. My word choice did not reflect the function of my piece. As a result, my piece as a whole was not as impactful as it could have been had my writing style reflected the purpose I wished to convey.
Developing personal bias and writing style have helped me tremendously in connecting passion, writing technicalities, and function in my pieces. However, I consider drafting to be the tool that has helped most in improving my writing. It is so interesting for me to look back upon my work this semester and see my progression of ideas through successive drafts of the same paper. Coming into this course, my biggest problem with writing was my tendency to overwrite. Worse still, I did not initially recognize this as a problem. Drafting has helped me realize and improve this tendency. I have seen the evolution of my successive preliminary drafts to the final, concise, and well-structured one.
I am truly grateful to Dr. James for helping me improve my writing. Editing requires patience, especially for my own writing. I am taking from this class not only the ability to write well and with purpose with respect to documentary theater and film, but also the confidence to apply this ability to all other venues of written expression.