Stone, C. (2011). Graduation Speech. Renaissance High School Graduation.

 

This is a good example of my work before college, where I first had to show creativity and structure. I decided to compare my four years of high school to the life of being a Michigan football fan. The reason I thought this analogy worked was because just as my friends and I were transitioning from high school to college, Michigan was transitioning into a new head football coach, Brady Hoke. Just as the previous 4 years had been difficult for us in high school, the past 4 years were difficult for Michigan fans.  Just as the future with Hoke looked bright (hindsight is 20/20), college looked bright. But we had to realize that this was going to be a challenge, and that there would be growing pains with our new stage of life, as most people would expect with a new coach.

 

This was impactful for me because this was a very last minute change. My original speech was a boring speech about how you never forget high school. The change to the football analogy was something that was necessary. It also was a lot more fun to write then the first draft of the speech. I should have realized then that getting creative with the structure will lead to better work, as this was the first pure example of that.

 

Stone, C. (2011). Different memories of the darkest days of Detroit. RCSCI 260: Theorizing Knowledge, University of Michigan.

 

This was the first essay I wrote that I actually enjoyed writing. Part of the reason I enjoyed writing it was because I got to incorporate my family in on the assignment, but I also enjoyed writing it because it was the first time I was given a little more freedom with my own writing while in college.  For this one, I was given the chance to write about a part of my hometown that I didn’t really know about. Not to mention, for me this was the essay that sparked my obsession with Detroit. Maybe it was because I personally view the city as part of my identity, so it was like writing about that for the first time. As I noted in the essay, it was also the first paper that allowed me to get a little creative with the wording. Since I was piecing my grandparents quotes into a story, I saw it as a chance to get a little creative. Apparently it worked out.

 

This was a very important essay for me because it is the first essay that taught me the importance of interviews, which is something I used throughout my time in college. Interviews are an interesting way of getting research because the accounts are personal accounts. People’s stories are more intimate than simply reading about what happened. The one thing that has to be taken into account with interviewing however is if these are completely factual accounts. I made sure to fact check what my grandparents told me so that the story was factual.

 

Stone, C. (2012). Why we love Harry Potter. RCCORE 100: The Trials and Tribulations of Harry Potter, University of Michigan.

 

This was the final essay I wrote for my first year writing seminar. This class was the first class that I took at the university that completely interested me from beginning to end. In this essay, I also used interviews to help me find patterns and reasons that answered my questions. This time however, the interviews weren’t in person. Instead I posed the question of “Why do you like Harry Potter” to my friends online. Almost every person I asked gave me a different answer, but the fact that it was all written out allowed me to find the patterns between what different people said.

 

This essay showed me how enjoyable analytical writing on a topic I cared deeply about could be. I was able to be more creative with my analysis in this paper because I dealt with relationships that people had fostered. When analyzing something that has a personal connection, you must always take that into consideration. If you simply look at your information from purely analytical perspective, you might not be able to connect to what the person is saying. However, if you have a creative mindset in your analysis, you can treat the subject more in depth.

 

Stone, C. (2012). The never ending Battle. RCHUMS 200.  University of Michigan.

 

This was the first class in college where I was allowed to let my imagination run completely and utterly free. The story was something that I had going through my head for months. I had just finished watching a series called Supernatrual, so I decided to write something similar to one of the seasons main story arc. It ended up being a slight retelling of the Book of Revelations with the Archangel Michael and Lucifer fighting in several different dimensions. For years, Michael kept losing, and every time the world was destroyed. This finally came to an end when Michael finally showed up in a dimension before Lucifer did, and ended up having a family. Michael’s grandson and his friends ended up being the key to destroying Lucifer once and for all.

 

Needless to say, it is not as confusing to read the actual book as it is to explain it. While this was fun to write, it was unbearably difficult at times. No one really tells aspiring authors how difficult it is to fill out a story even when you have a beginning, middle and end. You need structure to guide the essay where to go. It makes things easier. Without it, it is incredibly difficult keep track of where the story is supposed to go. This to me is the essay that made me realize structure was absolutely as necessary as creativity.

 

Stone, C. (2012). The Legend of Korra. COMM 101: Mass Media, University of Michigan.

 

The Legend of Korra essay I wrote holds a very special place in my heart. This is mainly because this was the first essay for my major that I enjoyed writing. It is a media analysis of the Nickelodeon series: Avatar: The Legend of Korra. The show had just aired, and we had recently covered representation of women in media in Communication Studies 101. For the essay, we had to watch a show and analyze how it either breaks or reinforces specific stereotypes. While the prompt for the essay had originally given a list of shows that we were allowed to use, it also stated that if there was another show we thought applied, we could present it to our professor to get the ok. Luckily for me, I presented a good enough case to use the show as a topic.

 

This essay is significant to me because I believe it is the first time I fulfilled every single thing the prompt was asking me to do. At that time in my education, I was struggling to find answers to certain points in a prompt. When it came to complete analysis essays, I would come close, but not fully achieve what the professor was looking for me to do. This time, I finally figured it out. I also was able to draw on future outcomes of what the series might provide. I still believe this is one of the better essays I have written.  I think the reason that I was able to hit the points on each essay was because it was the kind of analysis where you had to use creativity to make the essay work. With the analysis I was doing, I had to really dig deep and find what were legitimate arguments. It wasn’t the type of assignment where I could present numbers as an argument, so creativity was key.

 

Stone, C. (2014). The Curse of Little Brother. The Stone Sports Report, Retrieved from: https://stonesportsreport.wordpress.com/2014/01/02/the-curse-of-little-brother/

 

I am including this into the annotated bibliography because it is kind of what lead me to start believing that I was decent at telling stories. My attempts at sports blogging were always about telling stories. In this blog post, I wrote about the rivalry between Michigan and Michigan State. At the time, Michigan State had just won the Rose Bowl and had been ranked as the Number 3 team in the country. Michigan on the other hand, was coming off of a 6-7 with a humiliating loss in the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl. Honestly, this was a blog post that was more filled with anger than anything else.

 

This was also the first time that I tried to add media outside of simple prose. It showed me the importance of supplementary media in certain types of writing. It helps give more context to certain stories and helps support the overall narrative of what people are trying to say. It can be an incredibly powerful storytelling tool that not everyone knows how to use effectively.

Part of the reason that video helps to add to a story is because you can only see and fully comprehend some of the subtler things, such as how in the video Mike Hart is much smugger in his comments than I indicate in the writing aspect of the post.
 

Stone, C. (2014). Why I Write. Writing 220: Minor In Writing Gateway, University of Michigan.

 

The Why I write essay is a turning point in my writing for me. Until this moment, I had not had the chance actually explore why I liked writing aside form the fact that I was good at it, and it gave me less stress than exams did. Why I write made me consider exactly why I thought writing is a worth while practice.

 

Figuring out that I write to tell stories helped me realize just how important my creative side is. Without the creative aspect of my writing, turning an analysis of a television show into a story of how that show can make an impact on the the future. It can make a historical analysis of a person and turn it into a story of how someone overcame serious trials and tribulations. Quite simply, writing academic papers creatively can make things much more interesting.

 

What is interesting is that It did not take me long to figure out just how this was working. When I started writing this assignment, I started out with the first story I had ever created. It made me remember that I had different ideas always coming through my head, and how great it was to put those ideas on paper. After carefully thinking about that, I realized that doing this was simply writing a story.

 

Stone, C. (2014). The Curse of Little Brother. Writing 220: Minor in Writing Gateway, University of Michigan.

 

This assignment was the repurposing project for the gateway course. I decided to use the Michigan vs. Michigan State blogpost as my original piece, because it was something I had become very proud of at the time. I figured that it was a good concept and that I had only really scratched the surface of that story.
 

I decided to repurpose it into a long form feature essay that you would find in a major sports news magazine. I decided to go with Sports Illustrated for the model. It was my first attempt at writing a feature story of that model, so I did not know exactly how much writing actually would go into it. Originally I thought that if I wrote 5 or 6 pages, that it would be enough. However, because I not only wanted to cover the history of the rivalry, but the reason why state schools become rivals with each other, I ended up writing 10 pages instead.

 

For this essay, storytelling was absolutely essential. I had to be creative because I had to create some type of tension. With magazine articles, the only thing you have to go off of are words and photos. If you aren’t using your creative side, the essay will become boring to read. You have to be creative in making depicting why the topic matters to someone instead of being something that is considered trivial.

 

Stone, C. (2014). Hey you! Listen! – My advice for incoming students. Writing 220: Minor in Writing Gateway, University of Michigan. Retrieved from: http://writingminor.sweetland.lsa.umich.edu/2014/12/hey-you-listen-my-advice-for-incoming-students/

 

Out of all of the blog posts I have written for the Minor in Writing, I have chosen this one in particularly because I decided to let my creativity flow. I had a feeling that I would not be able to grab the attention of incoming students unless I decided to be funny or aggressive. I started out with the title because it is a pretty popular phrase on the internet. From there whenever I made a point, I tried to add funny gifs that would make the reader laugh. I felt as though positive reinforcement was the best way to get my point across.

 

However, I also made sure that this was still a very structured piece. I started out with basic introductions to the course, then moved forward to some of the issues that people taking it may face. I would like to believe I did a decent job at telling the incoming students what to expect, as this year I received 4 different comments at the start of the semester. For me, this not only proved that my catchy headline was working, but that I also had some meaningful advice to offer the students as well. Hopefully, they followed it.  

 

Stone, C. (2015). The Real Detroit. English 325: The Art of the Essay, University of Michigan.

 

“The Real Detroit” is the second essay I had to write for English 325. For this topic, I had to write about a place that I knew very well, and for me there was no other place I knew better than my hometown. Essentially, this essay was a much longer, more history driven version of the essay I wrote my freshman year. In my opinion, Detroit had a story that needed to be told.

 

However, as I noted in the essay, sometimes there is so much information. When I wrote this, I ended up covering much more than I had originally intended. Instead of writing about how different things were living in modern day Detroit, or writing about how the city was transforming in front of my eyes, I ended up writing much more about the history of Detroit and why it ended up having to file for bankruptcy. At that point, I always thought that if you don’t explain something as easily as you can, you will not be able to completely tell the story. Yet because I included too much information into my first draft, my professor let me know that I could cut some of it in order to make things a more cohesive story. Even when I was finished however, I still think there were ways I could improve it.

 

Stone, C. (2015). Playing for Fun. English 325: The Art of the Essay, University of Michigan.

 

“Playing for Fun” was the last essay I wrote for 325. It was also the most effective. In this essay, I wrote about my love of baseball and how playing shaped me into the person I am today. This was the first time I believe that I had written a complete story that worked out from beginning to end without including too much information or losing track.

 

One of the things I learned with this essay is how to write with emotion in certain points, and how to hold back in others. Playing baseball was a very meaningful part of my life for several years, but I never exactly had that much success. There were points where I wanted to describe how emotionally distraught baseball had made me, but I realized that going into too much detail would be counterintuitive. Instead it made more sense to simply write with fewer words, and focus on describing moments instead of describing emotions.

 

This was the essay where I think I officially learned the key to storytelling. You have to learn where to find the balance between emotion and structure. If you write with too much emotion, you tend to over write. If you write with too much structure, the story becomes too dry.

 

Stone, C. (2015). What are you looking for? Examining the gaze in video games. Comm 365: Visual Culture and Visual Literacy, University of Michigan.

 

This essay is another assignment where creativity was needed. It was the final project for the class, and we had to turn a blog post we had already written into a much longer essay. Again it was the type of assignment where creativity was necessary to give a detailed analysis, and structure was necessary to keep the essay on topic. It dealt with examining the gaze, a psychoanalytic idea of how men look at women in movies. I chose to focus on video games that had a female protagonist, because it incorporated different ways that the player himself could potentially look at character they are controlling. Creating content for this essay required some very imaginative ways of thinking about how a player looks at a video game character. Luckily, there were Youtube clips that helped provide actual proof of what I was talking about.

 

This was also the first essay I wrote after the realization that structure was needed, and it was a good thing that I did. This essay had a very good chance of getting out of control because a lot of the topic could jump off course to talking about the plot of a video game instead of how the game is played.