-Write 1 paragraph on something you learned about writing’s relationship to social change—perhaps using a favorite text as a guide, with the wisdom of hindsight.

One thing that particularly stands out to me from the many things I’ve taken away from this course is the power that exists in showing rather than telling. I hesitated to select this aspect to discuss because it now seems to be a critical, obviously necessary thing to keep in mind when writing about social change, but that’s hindsight bias for you, and I truly did not have this in mind when I first entered the course. In thinking back to our first assignment on exactitude, I can now see that in the past I used to approach describing the need for social change “exactly” by providing as much detail into outlining the connections between what I was writing about and the overarching theoretical points I was trying to express as I could. During that assignment, I considered the fact that every individual’s perspective on reality is entirely different even when viewing the same situation and, because of this, I worried that my point would not come across clearly to readers if I did not provide a direct guide to understanding a situation I was writing about from my perspective. However, after engaging with Etel Adnan’s To Be in a Time of War and John Ruskin’s letters from Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, I reconsidered my prior writing style in discussing the need for social change. I realized that frequently referencing commonplace occurrences such as with the train whistling in Ruskin’s work and writing in Adnan’s style of repeated sentence structure and listing of step-by-step daily behaviors did not read as thoughtless or meaningless, but, in fact, inspired me to produce what I found to be the piece this quarter that best expressed my message. Just by listing daily interactions and showing how an issue at-hand influences one’s everyday experiences it is possible to identify to a reader just how pressing, ever-present, and impactful a certain societal problem is without having to tell the reader directly. Further, I now believe that there is great power in making sure to leave room for the reader to come to their own conclusions when presented with the evidence of daily impact, such as James Agee seemed to partly be addressing when discussing the desire to present his subject matter in the form of a museum exhibit in Now Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I understand this power to firstly come from the concept that a person will perhaps personally understand and better remember a conclusion they reached on their own rather than another individual’s that they merely read. Following that, in thinking about our final class discussion on the power of defamiliarization in theater, I now feel that I better understand part of what Berthold Brecht meant when he wrote that an audience member who does not become enveloped into a character on stage’s mindset is allowed an important space to “protest” in On Chinese Acting. In allowing a reader to review presented evidence, even though the selected display is still partly influenced by the author’s value system, rather than be told what to think of it through the mind of another, they can contribute their own realizations, questions, agreements, and disagreements. I believe this importantly starts an conversation between the author and readers in the writing of social change, a place where more added perspectives can allow necessary growth to occur, rather than a one-sided lecture.

-Write 1 question you have about writing and social change that emerges from your work in the course.

One question that I still have comes from our unit on letter writing versus lecture giving, specifically concerning the idea of determining a target audience. I still am questioning when and why one decides it is best to structure their writing on social change to be specifically accessible to those they believe to be similarly impacted by an issue at-hand or more so to as wide of an audience as one can reach? Does aiming to reach a wider audience mean that one should have to write in simpler terms, explain from the basics, write in a more universally acceptable language than their native tongue, or even leave out more complex or potentially controversial points so that the general argument is able to be understood and heard by more individuals or does it strip the author or some of their legitimacy and voice to feel obligated to do so?