My approach towards writing was relatively simple prior to my senior year of high school: communicate to the audience (which often times, was the teacher) what the audience wanted. Writing was more of a chore that had to be completed, with no set theory of writing that I had established for myself. 

Enter the senior year of high school, notorious for the dreadful college essays which have plagued high school students, such as myself, for years. Writing was annoying: what purpose could it possibly serve me? 

However, I powered along with my college essays, writing aimlessly without a true purpose or defining factor to my writing. That was until I had started the essays for the Sophie Davis program, and stumbled upon a prompt which left me dazed: what were my influences for pursuing a career in medicine. At that point, I figured I was just a high-school kid with no real influences in life. What could I know at this age about what I wanted? How could I even know what to write for such an important essay?

In the ensuing panic, a sudden wave of tranquility permeated my mind. My life experiences were meaningful and shaped my influences in medicine, and so I began to reflect back on all my past experiences, whether it be for being made fun of my weight, to losing that weight, and then dealing with being uncomfortable in my own body. I began to write about my body transformation for my Sophie Davis essay, as this was an experience I found extremely meaningful to my ambitions in becoming a physician. In this introspection were bold statements, not typical of my other writing, that demanded gravity and attention towards them. “It was right after my 15th birthday that his playful demeanor took a serious turn. ‘Your BMI is 35. Your cholesterol and sugar levels are off the charts, and considering your family’s history of heart disease, you may very well end up dead by 50.’” By including these words, the same ones which my doctor had said to me, I eliminate the middleman and convey to the audience my raw experience and emotion, unfiltered by any censor and true to my experience. Following this rhetoric with “for the first time my parents, who were sitting in the doctor’s examination room with me, saw their overweight child in front of them not as their cherubic boy with a healthy appetite but as one who carried potentially fatal health issues.” resulted in an essay that was as powerful as emotionally powerful as it was true to my experience. 

Taking this sentiment with me to my FIQWS class, the first assignment which presented a similar situation as the one in my college essay was the narrative “Outsiders” essay. I sat there, desperately looking at my paper for an answer, to the question of when there was a time in my life I had felt like an outsider. And it was in that moment where I drew upon my previous experiences and had decided to use introspection and again delve into those bold topics that convey the raw experience I went through.

Looking back through the memories like a highlight reel, I relived all those experiences of pain, as my narrative essay describes “Not only was I an outsider with my friend group, but I felt like an outsider in my own body.” My writing process not only includes reliving these experiences simultaneously in my head, which in turn adds to the richness of the writing, but it also includes careful planning and introspection to be able to convey those heavy experiences. My reflection for my narrative essay reflects the sentiment of having experienced a shift in my usual writing style, as “argumentative essays were more along the lines of what I was being asked to do, with no regard to any personal experiences,” whereas now I was encouraged to use those personal experiences I used to shy away from out of fear of not being accepted. My rhetoric shifted from one that relied on safe terms and keeping within the edges to rhetorical strategies that allow for a greater impact to be left on the reader, as my writing exemplifies. 

Hence, my theory of writing is to take bold leaps and to not shy away from those moments, but rather embracing and delving into them in my writing. My personality and my life experiences, due in part to my thought process that goes in before I begin to write, shine through my writing and are a true reflection of not only who I am as a writer, but more importantly as a person.

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