As we began our work in this summer, I believed that most of our work will simply revolve around workplace diversity from reading all the assigned articles. But after some time, as we delved into topics that we are personally interested in, it became more interesting for me since we had to connected all the dots, with all our previous readings, and I had to figure out how I can connect organizational culture, diversity, as well as my area of interest, history, into one presentation. And out of all the readings, the book They Say I Say really showed me a new way of writing. I also thought that university-level writing has to be overly complicated, filled with complex vocabulary only professionals in the field will understand. But the conversational style taught in the reading made me understand that the writer has to connect with the reader and that that is the essential point. It became clear to me that whether your style of writing is formal or casual wasn’t the main problem, but how the reader feels in playing a part in the writing as well. Working on this project, I learned to utilize tools that I haven’t used over the few years in Syracuse, especially the Student Library. Since my major is in industrial design, I rarely used the library site until now, and I was really surprised by the amount of information and educating articles that I found. Because of this, I will continue to use tools such as Google Scholar and Web of Knowledge for my future endeavors of writing.
Writing has never been something that I am particularly good at, and my interest in the area was not especially high since rarely did I have the opportunity to express my viewpoints this way. But over the course of this summer, writing so much about my firm belief in the necessity of history education improvement gave me a new confidence in writing, and it is a preparation for me to get my views across in the future, especially in the workplace. Just like I wrote before, my understanding of TSIS changed my overall style of writing as well, and because of that, presenting my point no longer needs to seem like a lecture on paper, but an invitation for conversation. In industrial design, we often learn about the increasing “democratization” of design among the designer and the target consumers, meaning that the field of design is no longer a strictly exclusive group. The conversational style of writing in TSIS is similar, and maybe we are getting closer to the democratization of writing as well.
Although this writing course is only a few months long, and it is very likely that many of us will forget about this class a few years into the future, I think that the content that I researched for my final project and the book TSIS will be a part of me in the coming future. Once an idea is out of your head and placed in solid form, it will stick with you. As for everyone reading this, I hope you will enjoy this coming fall semester and have a pleasant rest of the year.
