rebeckah lynn pace

Who Am I?

            Welcome to my writing portfolio! My name is Rebeckah L. Pace, and I am from Wadesboro, NC. I am currently a senior at Wake Forest University, but by the time you read this, I most likely will have already graduated (hopefully!) in May, 2018. I am a double major in Communication and Religious Studies with concentrations in Media Studies and Religion and Public Engagement. I am also a minor in Interdisciplinary Writing, which is why this lovely writing portfolio exists (putting it together was a requirement for the minor). Post-graduation I am moving to New York, New York to begin my career as a financial analyst for an expert network and primary research firm, Coleman Research. I move into my apartment on the Upper West Side in T-27 days—I’m so excited!

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            I know you’re probably thinking, “Communication AND Religious Studies major? Where did Media Studies come from? What exactly is Religion and Public Engagement? Wow… finance? I didn’t see that coming…” Well, truth be told, my journey through Wake Forest has been messy and all over the place. I came into college thinking that I was going to major in Political Science and International Affairs, and land a post-grad job on Capitol Hill (boy, was I off!). I am a first generation college student who had to figure out most things on her own. This was extremely difficult, but I am super proud to have chosen the interesting academic combo that I described above. And, as I mentioned above, I landed a job, so it all worked out in the end. However, you may be pondering the question, “how does all of this fit together?” Well, the key term bridging all of my crazy academic endeavors together is the first word of my writing minor: interdisciplinary.

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            According to the Merriam-Webster definition, interdisciplinary “involves two or more academic, scientific, or artistic disciplines.” I think we can agree that my academic interests meet this definition, which is why I decided to minor in Interdisciplinary Writing. I have always been fascinated by various subjects and I enjoy writing, so this minor for me was a match made in heaven. Now I will turn over to the next section of my introduction, which will discuss how I have developed as a writer over the course of my time at Wake Forest University.

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How have I developed as a writer?

            First-year students at Wake Forest University, like most other schools, are required to take a writing course; here it is called Writing 111. While “freshman comp” sometimes gets a bad wrap, it made me fall in love with writing, something that I believed to be rather unappealing when I was in high school. In this course, I learned about the rhetorical appeals: pathos (appeals to emotion), logos (appeals to reason), and ethos (appeals to credibility). I learned how to write effective beginnings and endings in my compositions. I learned how to write while keeping in mind my rhetorical situation (audience, purpose, setting, etc.). I learned the importance of revision when writing. I learned so much in this class and found out that I actually enjoy writing. It also helped to have a fantastic professor, Dr. Giovanelli. Dr. G was super encouraging and challenged me to work hard to craft the best writing that I had ever crafted at the time. I discovered that I was a better writer than I thought, which was a huge confidence boost after completing my first semester of college. Dr. G urged me to pursue the new interdisciplinary writing minor, and I declared the minor in the fall of my sophomore year.

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            After declaring my minor, I began taking writing courses almost every semester. The courses I took that counted for the minor include: Academic Research and Writing, Literary Nonfiction: The Art of the Essay, Interaction in Language: Introduction to Written Discourse Studies, Writing for Public Relations and Advertising, Beginners Poetry Workshop, Advanced Fiction Writing, and the Writing Minor Capstone course. All of these courses allowed for me to choose topics that were of interest to me when completing writing assignments. This idea of writing to pursue personal interests is an idea that two distinguished composition and rhetoric professors, Marcia Curtis and Anne Herrington, explore in their article “Writing Development in the College Years: By Whose Definition?” Curtis and Herrington describe in their article a longitudinal study that they conducted of four undergraduate writers. After analyzing the work of these student participants, they found that the students’ writing development and personal development were furthered by class projects where they were able to use writing to pursue personal interests. They also found that their students showed syntactic growth, growth in critical thinking, and development within a given discourse community— the kinds of development which they believe fit within the values of a liberal arts education.

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            Curtis and Herrington’s point is well-taken. I found that, when I was able to use my writing to pursue personal interests, both my writing and personal development seemed to happen more quickly and to be of higher quality. In other words, I became more interested in the assignment and therefore more invested in the writing that I was doing. In addition, when writing assignments asked for my self-reflection and/or for me to connect what I was writing about to my own personal experiences, I found I was more likely to dig deeper into the “so what?” section of my writing and apply what I wrote into my everyday life.

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            In addition to this idea of writing to pursue personal interests, I have also found that my writing development mirrors what scholars Chris Thaiss and Terry Myers Zawacki say in their book, Engaged Writers and Dynamic Disciplines. In particular, they describe three stages of development that undergraduate writers typically go through. In the first stage, a student uses very limited experience in writing, one or two courses perhaps, to build a general picture of “what all teachers expect.” Next, in the second stage, the student, at a third- or fourth-year level, moves to a “radically relativistic” view of academic writing (believing teachers “all want different things”) after encountering teachers’ different methods, interests, and emphases. Students are likely to feel confused in this stage because they view their professors as idiosyncratic, not as conforming to disciplinary standards. In the third and final stage, which not all students reach in their undergraduate years according to Thaiss and Zawacki’s research, the student uses the variety of courses in a major toward building a complex, but organic sense of the structure of the discipline. These students have a nuanced construct of the academic discipline, demonstrating a sense of coherence-within-diversity (139). 

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            How do these apply to me? I agree with these three stages because I can feel that I have personally experienced them. Since I am a double major in Communication and Religious Studies, I have had the unique experience of learning how to write within both of these disciplinary frameworks. In terms of my religious studies major, I took my first course when I was a freshman and I had absolutely no experience writing in this academic discipline since religion courses were not offered at my public high school. However, after taking my first few courses, I began to get more and more comfortable with writing in the discipline. I started to build a general picture of what all teachers in the religion department might expect, lining up with the first stage of Thaiss and Zawacki’s writing development. For example, I believed that all religious studies professors expected for me to write theory-driven analyses using theories and concepts that we learned about in the class because these were the only types of writing assignments that I was exposed to at the time.

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                Then, as I grew more advanced in religious studies in my third- and fourth-year, I began to sense that all of my teachers wanted something different: my theory-driven religion professors expected papers that were radically different from my professors who approached religion with a more empathetic viewpoint. For example, in my Mahayana Buddhism course that I took junior year, I had to go to my professor’s office hours multiple times to ask him what he meant by his comments in the margins of my returned papers as well as to clarify where I was coming from with my arguments. This was incredibly frustrating because I felt as though I wrote papers that met disciplinary standards for religious studies. I also felt somewhat misled by drawing on past experiences with writing other papers for the religion department because I did not run into any problems when writing these papers. This confusion is in accordance with Thaiss & Zawacki’s second stage of writing development, where student writers perceive idiosyncrasy and subjective randomness rather than coherence in disciplinary standards. 

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            I believe that I am currently within the third stage of writing development, as I am now seeing that, despite the nuances that exist in the field, there is still cohesiveness in religious studies. I am taking a required religion major capstone course called REL 399: Senior Colloquy. One of the main purposes of this course is to intentionally reflect on what we have learned, the nature of religious studies as a discipline and its connection to the mission of the humanities and liberal arts, and the skills that we’ve acquired through the religion major. This course is already accomplishing some of the things that Thaiss & Zawacki commented on for stage three, which is building a complex, but organic sense of the structure of the discipline. According to the text, a crucial element of this stage is “the student’s sense of his or her place within the disciplinary enterprise” and that “the writer’s passion for the subject is essential for good academic writing” (140). Through putting together a portfolio of my writing assignments in previous religious classes, I am gaining a better understanding of my place within this major. I would say that my place in the field of religious studies is largely influenced by my concentration in Religion and Public Engagement as well as my other major in Communication. Other religious studies majors, however, for the most part, find themselves in a different place in the field than I find myself. For example, another religion major in my class has a double major in Women and Gender Studies, so his place in the field of religious studies focuses on issues of gender through a religious studies lens. I now have not only a better understanding of my passions within the field, but also a better understanding of the passions of other scholars of religious studies and how they shape the discipline as a whole.

What can I do as a writer?

            I have gained an array of skills over the course of my writing journey at Wake Forest University. The following sections will go into more detail on each of the following skills: understanding discourse communities, genre awareness and knowledge, writing and arguing across disciplines, and combating writer’s block.

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Understanding Discourse Communities

            I have taken classes in film, communication, theatre, creative writing, journalism, religion, and many more subjects, and I have had to write in all of them. This required me to adapt my writing to the diverse writing expectations of each of these discourse communities. Take for instance a community of communication scholars, on one hand, and a community of creative poets, on the other. My writing style and techniques for these two communities are very different. I tend to use academic language and lengthy citations in my communication writings whereas I tend to utilize creative, imaginative language and rhyming schemes in my poems. At first I was frustrated when discovering the nuances of writing for different academic disciplines, similar to the frustrations I described above when learning the nuances that exist in just one academic discipline. However, just as I moved through Thaiss and Zawacki’s three stages of writing development when writing for religious studies, I did the same for other academic disciplines (and I am on different stages depending on the academic discipline).

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            Esteemed linguistics scholar, John Swales, created eight criteria to use in order to define a discourse community (DC). These eight criteria come together to define a DC as a group of people who share certain goals and utilize particular forms of discourse as a means to communicate and achieve their goals. After reading about these eight criteria, I discovered that, although lots of differences exist between discourse communities, certain similarities also exist. For example, one major similarity can be drawn from his fourth criteria, “a DC utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims” (p.15). I’ve found that communication writing and poetry writing both utilize and possess multiple genres. Communication writing includes genres such as peer reviewed research articles, proposals for research, literature reviews, theme analyses, and more. The same can be said for poetry, which includes genres such as slam poetry, sound poetry, visual poetry, performance poetry, and more. Therefore, I learned that while the various DCs that I belong to are different in that they require and expect for certain criteria to be met when writing for their academic discipline, discourse communities are similar in that they all “have goals and purposes, and use communication to achieve their goals” (p. 9). Now I will discuss my skills in terms of genre.

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Genre Awareness & Knowledge

            I have written book chapters, grant proposals, research articles, visual poetry, blog posts and more, and all for a variety of different discourse communities. However, before I was an interdisciplinary writing minor, I only knew of one genre: an argumentative paper (typically in the format of the all too familiar five-paragraph essay). After taking courses for my minor such as Introduction to Written Discourse Studies, Academic Research and Writing, and the Art of the Essay, I learned that writing isn’t this simple. For example, scholars J.R. Martin and D. Rose in their book Working with Discourse: Meaning Behind the Clause, found that many different genre families exist and that even within these genre families were various elemental genres. The five-paragraph essay, which they call an exposition, was just one of the elemental genres they found in the “arguments” genre family. They found nineteen other elemental genres such as a narrative in the story genre and an autobiographical recount in the factual stories genre. I am now more aware of the various genres that exist.

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            In addition to genre awareness, I am also more aware of genre flexibility. One of the assignments for my writing minor capstone course was to take a written piece that I wrote for another class and to repurpose it for a new audience. I took a theme analysis that I wrote for a communication course and repurposed it into a magazine article. The original piece was written to a specific audience of communication scholars whereas the new piece was written to a general audience of young adults. I am now able to take a genre that was written for a particular audience and repurpose it for a new audience. Now I will discuss my skills in terms of writing and arguing across disciplines.

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Writing and Arguing Across Disciplines

            Earlier I discussed how I have developed an appreciation for the various nuances of writing for multiple academic disciplines. One of these nuances that I discovered and have developed in my own writing is arguing across disciplines. Written communication scholar Christopher R. Wolfe wrote in his article “Argumentation Across the Curriculum” about a study he conducted in which he explored how different kinds of arguments are situated in academic contexts. He provided an analysis of undergraduate writing assignments and found that argumentation is valued across the curriculum, yet different academic contexts require different forms of argumentation. This inspired me to conduct my own study after being given an assignment for my writing minor capstone course to interview one or two professors who represent different academic disciplines. I chose to interview two professors from my major departments, one in religious studies and one in communication, on how they argue in their writing in each of their fields. I was expecting for each discipline to have one or two strict ways of arguing, but found that this was not the case. In fact, in both of my interviews I found that my professors described their fields as interdisciplinary. For example, my religious studies professor said that the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religions values an argument structure that includes a literature review section, a methods sections, a results section, a discussion section, etc. whereas a theoretical religion journal values arguments that showcase why certain theories are relative today. The first discourse community values empirical arguments whereas the second values text-based arguments. Therefore, although my study lines up with Wolfe’s findings (that argumentation is valued across the curriculum, but that different academic contexts require different forms of argumentation), it also pushes them even further to showcase that even within academic disciplines, different forms of argumentation are required depending on the focus. Now I will discuss my skills in terms of combating writer’s block.

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Combating Writer’s Block

            When I first got to Wake Forest University I experienced many cases of writer’s block. I think this was because in high school and early freshman year I fell into the trap of using rigid rules and inflexible plans when completing writing assignments. This lines up with what composition and communication scholar Mike Rose found in his observations after interviewing ten students about their writing experiences, which can be found in his article “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer's Block.” Five of the students he interviewed shared that they write with relative ease while the other five shared that they experience some form of writer’s block. He found that it wasn’t skill or emotion that separated the students who experienced writer’s block from the students who didn’t. What he found instead was that the five students who did experience blocking were all operating either with writing rules or with planning strategies that impeded rather than enhanced their composing processes. He discovered that the five students who were not affected by writer's block also utilized rules, but less rigid ones, and ones more appropriate to a complex process like writing. In addition, the plans that the students who did not experience writer’s block brought to the writing process were more functional, more flexible, and more open to information from the outside. Rose concluded his article with a brief note on treatment that said, “Rather than get embroiled in a blocker's misery, the teacher or tutor might interview the student in order to build a writing history and profile” (400). He claimed that interviews could reveal an incredible amount of information about individual composing processes as well as reveal rigid rules or an inflexible plan that may lie at the base of a student’s writing problem.

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            I agree with Rose that interviews could be a great way to spot and treat writer’s block early. I, however, did not have the benefit of having instructor interviews. I just got more and more comfortable with my own writing process and confident with what I was writing. I have also learned what rules and plans work for me, and I stretch and shape these rules and plans to fit together with my unique writing process. I think this is why I experience a lot less writer’s block now than I did in my early writing years. For the most part, treating writer’s block comes with practice and gaining valuable writing experience.

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Now, the portfolio!

            Thank you for reading my introduction! Now, I invite you to take a look at my writing portfolio. I have separated my writings into four major categories, which you can find on the tabs across the top of this page: (1) Communication, (2) Religious Studies, (3) Creative Writing, and (4) Linguistics. Once you click on a category, you will be directed to a new page where you can find all of the works that I have written that fall within the category. There are brief descriptions of each of the writings as well as buttons that you can click on in order to read the actual works. Simply click on a button and a PDF file of the work should pop-up.

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References

Curtis, Marcia & Herrington, Anne. “Writing Development in the College Years: By Whose

            Definition?” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 55, No. 1, Sep., 2003, pp.

            69-90.

Rose, Mike. “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis

            of Writer's Block.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 31, No. 4, Dec.,

            1980, pp. 389-401.

Swales, John. “Reflections on the concept of discourse community.” Asp, Vol. 69, Mar 2016, pp.

            7–19.

Thaiss, Chris & Zawacki, Terry Myers. Engaged Writer and Dynamic Disciplines.

            Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., 2006.

Wolfe, Christopher R. “Argumentation Across the Curriculum.” Written Communication, Vol.

            28, No. 2, 2011, pp. 193-219.