Nothing seems to be more important to the Minor in Writing at Michigan than creative thinking.  And let me tell you, creative thinking is not always easy.  It requires incredible patience, many hours of reflection, and just a dash of insanity.  

 

Something worth knowing about me is that I'm a worrier.  Being the anxious fellow that I am, I often approach new challenges with an eager mind and a queasy stomach.  It's understandable, then, that I came to the minor's first major project with mixed feelings. The assignment, called "Re-Purposing an Argument," required me to take an old piece of writing, which could be anything from a note passed in class to a thesis, and direct its argument towards a new audience.  "Lord," I thought to myself, "what have I gotten myself into?"

 

This was a project I knew would require extensive creative thinking.  While I was excited to revisit a piece from the past and cast it into something new and fresh, I had no idea how I was going to do that.  After several sleepless nights, however, I heeded my mother's timeless advice to "buckle down," and I began writing to organize my ideas.  

 

I knew that I wanted to use a piece from my history courses at Michigan. Some of my most recent work had been done in those classes, and I hoped to gain new insights into my arguments through the re-purposing project.

 

I knew from experience, however, that the public at large doesn't have quite the interest in interpreting the past that I do.  So as I approached my re-purposing project, I wondered how I could make a historical topic interesting to people who, unlike my professors, haven't chosen to analyze the past for a living. How could I make a subject like women's role in abolition movements during the ninteenth century, which most people (even those with some interest in history) see as esoteric and useless, relevant to a wider audience?

 

And then it clicked.  To get people interested in the past, I would have to tie it to the present.  People like the present.  They like learning about the world around them, and are especially voyeuristic when it comes to things like politics and personal lives.  Realizing this, I came to an idea about how I could make the past worthwhile to people today.  And so I asked: why is it that Hillary Clinton is using a very similar strategy to abolitionists during her presidential campaign?  Why is she talking incessantly about being a mother, like abolitionists did, when she should be trying to win the presidency? 

 

These were big questions, ones that I was excited to dig into to satiate both potential readers' and my own curiosity.  To confront this topic, I decided to create an online article that I imagined would be read by politically aware and interested readers in a publication like The Atlantic.  In this genre, I felt that I would have enough flexibility to explore the topic in full while making it accessible to anyone fascinated by politics or American affairs.  The result of my re-purposing project is a piece that seeks to explain why Clinton has taken on the same strategy that abolitionists used, while exploring the ideas of what this means about American society and the 2016 presidential race. It does not aim to promote or denounce Clinton, but instead seeks to challenge readers to consider ways that historical legacies continue to affect our society.