Whydoesthismatter?

 

Within my voice as a writer, I've become prone to writing

in a sacarstic way. Maybe that's because I just think that

I'm funny, or writing is the only way for me to

sucessfully express humor. Either way, I enjoy tackling

lifestyle issues with a humorous edge--and that makes

up my repurposing assignment. 

 

When I was in high school, I was a so called

"goody-two-shoes." Maybe that's a litlte extreme, but

while my friends began to drink and experiment with

strange sounding drugs, it was never my scene. And as

the underage drinking continued throughout high school,

I stood as the observer and centered many of my articles

around it. Now I wasn't the kind of "goody-two-shoes" that you may be imagining--so don't hate me right away. I didn't alienate my friends, and stray away from my social scene because I didn't necessarily agree with their choices at the time. I wasn't a tattle tale or stay home alone on friday nights talking to my dogs, simply because I couldn't stand the site of alcohol--don't you worry. It became known that I was the friend who didn't drink at the time (at 16-years-old, let me remind you), and people were fine with that. It became my thing, and in fact, it deemed great for motivation within my writing. 

 

At this time in my life, I was writing a bi-weekly column for AOL's online newspaper, Patch.com. Within these columns, I would tackle high-school issues at the time and evaluate the norms--and drinking was within topic. One specific article that I wrote, titled "SATs, Homeocoming, and Vodka Shots? referenced such culture, and was written by my 16-year-old self on the topic of drinking and drug use becoming prominent among my peers. Due to the similar drinking culture within college campuses, I chose to focus on this specific article as the topic of my repurposing assignment. 

 

The objective of the assignment was as follows: "to build, to stretch, the rhetorical expertise and strategies you have available to you as a writer in a focused and reflective way as a step toward meeting your writing goals for the Minor and more generally." The assignment required us to start with a piece of writing that we've already completed, and repurpose it for a new audience and with a new or extended argument. By taking the critique of drinking culture at such a young age in my original article, I chose to extend the argument to mock the drinking culture on college campuses. By exhibiting a satirical tone, I embeded various tweets positively enforcing college drinking norms, and responded to them as in complete argeement, taking on the persona of a college student emersed in this drinking culture. By doing so, I attempted to mock the obsession with drinking and partying on college campuses, as well as satiricially enforce that such a culture is the definition of college. 

 

The audience of repurposed piece were college students who embed themselves in such a culture, framing their morals and standards throughout their college career around drinking and partying--and shedding light on its ridiculousness. Additionally, I thought that college students who clearly exhibit a different culture--spending their days in the library, studying, etc.--would find such ridiculousness appealing and light-hearted, as it fails to acknowledge the truth behind college life. Finally, I wanted to enforce such a satirical tone to mock the interpretaton of the college culture to elders, who view college-aged students as irresponsbile binge drinkers. 

 

Constructing this piece required research of genres, formats, rhetorical situations and conventions, in order to ensure that the satirical tone was apparent and supporting my main argument. The repurposed assignment allowed me to build off of a previous argument, linking two different points in my life and writing, and combining them to extend to a greater audience--and specifically, one more relevent at this time in my life. The specific project allowed me to analyze the meanings behind my writing, as well as different foundations within the writing needed to grasp a particular audience and focus. While I constantly write lifestyle articles, such an assignment allowed me to stay within my voice and genre, while learning to add numerous different elements in order to add increased depth to my writing. 

 

And that is why this matters.