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Winnie-the-Pooh

"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."

Repurposing Project

My repurposing project is a children's story based on the style of Winnie-the-Pooh. It incorporates a few pictures from my family trip to Italy over the summer and the plot of the story follows actual places we visited (as you will see!).

Remediation Project

My remediation project is, basically, a different spin on the same information in my repurposing project. I found inspiration in a YouTube video called "True Facts About the Cuttlefish," as you can see above. Curious how cuttlefish relate to ancient Rome? Click below to find out!

Outside Artifact

This is something not written for the class, but that I am highlighting here. I wrote this over the summer in my free time just to practice writing. Curious? Only one way to find out!

Writing 220 Projects

Repurposing and Remediation

The Repurposing and Remediation projects share a common requirement: they must have the same audience and the same argument. Click on the Repurposing first before heading over to the Remediation.

Why I Write

We have been taught the science of writing all our lives.  Just like any science, it begins with the basics and works its way up to a more complex, more sophisticated skillset that we use to further our own ends. ‘What are these skills,’ you ask? I’ll show you.

First: a a a a a a a a. W r i t e, r i n s e, r e p e a t. We memorize a string of letters to make a string of words. We plop them into sentences and we get a gold star. Simple ideas make simple sentences, and we are content.

Next: The famous 5-paragraph essay. Formula? Introduction, 3 Body Paragraphs with 3 Examples, Conclusion. Easy to practice, easy to master. No room for error, no room to breathe. Only the rule followers make the cut. Creativity is stifled, and conformity is enforced.

Now: The 5-page academic response. Our esteemed professors demand 3 essays derived from 3 questions provided in the syllabus. Each must include 3 readings provided in the course, and the 3 core themes? Again, provided.

Our entire academic lives we are spoon-fed all the requirements just as, now, I am shuttled from the First Year Writing course to the Upper Level Writing course, happily, blindly. We flex our analytic minds within the narrow specifications of academic essay-writing like bonsais, prodded and pruned until we reach the perfectly sheltered, perfectly structured individuality we call our ‘voice.’ Our aim is simple: please the prof and get the A. All artistic pleasure from writing is replaced by working the system and doing what we must. We are consenting, self-exploiting subjects, worker bees drinking the Kool-Aid to get the letter of recommendation and get the job.

How is this fulfilling? How can we call ourselves writers if all we’ve accomplished is being a little bit better than everyone else at being everyone else? We go through the motions and pretend we have agency and control when, in reality, we’re just being primped and polished to produce the same essays, the same ideas, and the same identity as everyone else.

There is a science to writing. We’ve been performing it all our lives.

Now, I’ve decided to do more with my writing.

I’ve decided not to sell my soul to Big Business or to perpetuate our broken political system. ‘How do you mean,’ you wonder? Well, how do people entice others to give them money? They bedazzle consumers with their multimillion dollar advertisement to sell their superfluous product and line their pockets with the hard-earned wages of struggling blue-collar workers. Or they reassuringly wax off symbol-laden but ultimately meaningless propaganda, chosen carefully time and time again to re-stitch shattered hope and obscure their true intentions of kowtowing to the highest bidder. Writing has deviously been developed and employed to exploit the common man and build a world where the difference between success and failure among the elites is how well you can lie; it has lost all preconception of innocence and it has lost all use beyond pure commercial or political utility.

I want more than that. I want to dive deep into the art of crafting clauses, sentences, and paragraphs and to embrace the spontaneity, the serendipity of writing. I want to discover in the little white marks on the deep black background beauty and love and joy and passion, and I want to reclaim wonder and individuality and to find hope and relief in an ever-darkening world. In the end, I want to do more than just write for the A or the paycheck or the influence and find meaning in a world that has been blinded by greed for grades, money, or power.

Thus, I’ve decided my goal in this ePortfolio and this course is to explore these forgotten realms of writing and reclaim its art and beauty. I’ve decided to break free from societal and academic expectations and to write for my own pretentious vanity where my classmates wrote for their résumés; I’ve decided to write aesthetically for aesthetics’ sake and sip the nectar of language to feel, to experience its sounds, syntax, and syllables; and I’ve decided to abandon the tenets of essay writing- clearness, conciseness, and compulsion- because sometimes whimsy and floweriness are better at conveying what I want to convey. Overall, I’ve decided to push myself beyond the comfortable confines of everything I’ve been taught and to write for no other purpose than to make beauty.

Yes, this sounds conceited and pompous and, dare I say, it is conceited and pompous. How could three little projects from a 20-year old hope to rekindle a neglected art form in a world that values practicality and simplicity? How could I possibly bring beauty to writing and to life where countless others before me have tried and failed, and have faded into the all-encompassing oblivion that is Time?

I don’t pretend to know. However, even if I can only scratch at the surface of the retired lyricism, the abandoned charm, and the bygone beauty of writing, then so be it. I’ll give it the old college try in every sense of the word and I hope you, too, can recapture some of the beauty of the written word. As the late and great Robin Williams once said, “Medicine, law, business, engineering. These are all noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love: these are what we stay alive for.”

Please. Stay alive.

Robin Williams

"Medicine, law, business, engineering. These are all noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love: these are what we stay alive for."

Ben Bugajski

Welcome to Writing 220 ePortfolio!

For some people, this course has been about building a professional portfolio. For others, it was about perfecting their academic writing. However, it took me about two and a half months to figure out what I had been craving in writing. Scroll down to the Why I Write assignment to find out what that is!

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