Sydni
"When someone asks me who I am, I respond by saying that I am a woman of God, dedicated to helping others, and becoming the best woman that I can be. "
​Scientist
Writer
World Traveler
Spanish-Speaker
My ultimate goal is to be a surgeon. For quite some tim I’ve been obsessed with the detail necessary for surgery, the mastery, the prestige of the profession, and most all the need for innovation and constant discovery. I’ve always known why I was so intrigued by surgery, but this semester I learned why I love writing. Writing, like surgery, can come in many forms. The only difference is that in writing we call these many forms genres while in medicine they are our cases. Either way the process is explorative and synonymous to an adventure. Both processes are experimental and in both instances we begin with a question we want to answer. Our question governs our research as we delve into those (either surgeons or writers) who have come before us, using their process as a guide, but not a blueprint.
Audience is to Patient as Writer is to Surgeon
The most important part, and the part which I have realized makes the expedition the most intriguing, is the test phase. In this part of the process we either yell out possible diagnoses and procedures to cure the patient or create mockups which display the many drafts we have gone through. In both surgery and writing it is important that we complete this cycle as many times as it takes, as there is a lot at stake, either the life of our patient or the humiliation associated with “bad” writing, but no matter the stakes, we get it done. WE power through. We are determined to finish and produce a product that satisfies our audience’s needs. Writers are like surgeons and surgeons are like writers. The process is the same, but their audiences and genres are different, thus, through this experimentation process I’ve realized that my drive to succeed at both is what makes me me.
Experimenting with my writing has afforded me the opportunity to realize all of this, but I have also realized that it is the journey to this conclusion which made me a better writer. Through this semester’s experimentation process, I was able to morph my personal statement into many different pieces according to my changing audience, similar to the way that a surgeon develops a different surgical plan depending on the patient’s desired outcome. In writing one piece which eventually took on many different forms (first a personal statement, then a prologue to a memoir, later a series of Facebook posts, and lastly a rap song) I realized just how important it is to get to know your audience. In medicine, doctors get to know their patients, making sure to ask the right questions in order to better understand their patients’ needs. Writing is the same way. In order to create a piece that delivers the message that our audience needs to hear and in a way that our audience will be receptive of it, we must understand the audience in the same way that a doctor understands his patient.
This semester I both succeeded and failed at this during my experimentation process. At the beginning of the process I chose to convert my personal statement into a Facebook post where I kept the theme of varying versions of success and sought to inspire students to strive for their own success despite their adversities. While my intentions were clear, I was very unhappy with the end result of the project and I could not figure out why. In the end I determined that it was because I hadn’t taken the time to get to know my audience. I had decided that I knew what was best for them and what they needed to hear from me, but I hadn’t researched my audience’s social media presence to see what exactly would get them to listen. With more research I found that the youth I wanted to impact didn’t use social media for the same reasons that I did. They didn’t browse the Internet to gain more knowledge, but instead used social media as an outlet for their hard-to-communicate feelings. This, combined with the dwindling Facebook presence of teenagers made my medium ineffective and my dense posts unlikely to be popular amongst my audience. However, sometimes a surgeon doesn’t achieve their goal with the first surgery and it unfortunately takes a series of surgeries to cure the patient. Similarly, it took another experiment for me to get it right. After redirecting my path and determining music to be a large realm of interest for the youth I sought to reach, I readjusted my genre in an effort to better interact with my audience. While I did not finish the song in its entirety, I felt that it was much better than the Facebook post and in the end could (if completed) embody everything that my audience both desired and needed.
Although I felt that I had failed in my second experiment (the Facebook post) I soon realized that I gained so much more than I’d lost. Not only was I able to pinpoint the part of the process in which I fell short, but I was also able to develop perseverance, a skill that I will soon use to endure lengthy surgeries. I realized that not only are “shitty first drafts” necessary, but shitty second, third, and fourth drafts sometimes happen too. In surgery these failures can result in physical harm or even death, however in neither instance do these drafts make us incapable of producing great work, but they actually make us stronger.
From my inadequate third draft of these Facebook posts I found that social media was not my strong point, I learned how to take constructive feedback, and how even a “finished” piece of writing can be unpolished. I realized how important others are to the conversation around both our own writing and others’ writing. These necessary conversations, the reflection on the process, the examination of my audience, and the realization of my own flaws were all important to making me a better writer. But this course made me more than a better writer, it made me a better future surgeon. A surgeon who recognizes that she can’t do it all alone. A surgeon that appreciates the need to understand her audience in order to satisfy them. A surgeon that understands that no surgery will be perfect and that sometimes we fail. A surgeon that realizes that there is more than one response to a rhetorical situation.