A GOOD START, BUT A START NONETHELESS
Having gathered my evidence, having thought long and hard about every single thing that Hillary Clinton and nineteenth century female abolitionists have in common, the time came to stop reasoning and start writing.
When writing, my goal was to produce a piece that resembled work I had seen in The Atlantic. In particular, Megan Garber's "The History of 'Thug'" and Tom Gjelten's "The Immigration Act That Inadvertently Changed America" served as inspirations showing the way that writing could invoke the past in order to make sense of the present.
After having a bit of trouble with crafting a catchy way to start my piece, I found my flow. A few hours later, I emerged from a caffeine induced haze with this, the first draft for my re-purposing project.
I would classify this draft as being strictly okay. It certainly did not turn out as bad as many of my first drafts do, probably because I worked very hard on it knowing my peers were all going to read and critique it in a full-class workshop, but the piece still wasn't quite where I wanted it to be. It felt too safe, not adventurous or bold enough. I wasn't sure, however, how to make it what I imagined it could be.
My peers' critiques were helpful in starting to see how the piece could be made better. Though people could understand my argument (something I had been worried about) and found the topic intriguing, they mentioned wishing that Hillary's voice had a greater presence in the piece. They also advised me to embed videos and images, rather than just links, in the article to make it more interactive and multimodal. My classmates made sure to tell me what they felt was working and what wasn't, which was extremely useful in beginning my revision process.
Ultimately, however, the most helpful piece of advice came from my instructor, Professor Shelley Manis. She encouraged me to get messy with Hillary. Now, at first this sounded off-putting to me. Messiness isn't exactly my thing. But as I thought about this advice, it began to make more and more sense. My concern with the piece was that it was too safe—too neat, if you will. So why not try getting a bit messy? If I wanted to be adventurous and bold, embrace the contradictions of Hillary, this was the way to do it.
With that in mind, I began to revise my piece by messing it up. While writing, I didn't worry too much about form or clarity—I had time to fix up those things later. Instead I just wrote whatever I could think of, making my piece speak more broadly to American gender norms, ideas about femininity, and the legacy of the past.
And out of that messiness came a piece I take considerable pride in having written. It is unlike anything I have done before, and I believe that for creating it, I am a better writer.
A very rough outline of the organization I envisioned for my piece.
I now present to you my finished product:
{
"Can you find more quotes? Maybe give Hillary a stronger voice."
"Not preachy or too harsh on her."
"Good voice and personable, but you might want to focus less on background information"