WP Reflection

Looking back at the projects that I went over in my Writerly Portfolio, I discovered a lot about what makes up the best of my writing and what makes the most engaging of my projects. My best pieces of writing originate from making connections between disciplines and breaking down a single subject into its parts in a non-biased way to be used as a tool to frame arguments and better understand the arguments of others.

So, when a set of prompts in my History of Music Baroque-Present class included a Literary Analysis, I jumped on it. At first I thought it was solely because of my love of literature. What I was excited about was creating a single thing that combined my skills from analyzing the mechanics of music and analyzing literary styles. I even made a connection that my professor hadn't caught on to after having read the piece over thirty times. I was used to writing papers for him that had to do with how a piece sounded. They were about 6-8 pages long, and had everything to do with the elements of it that audiences appreciated, but nothing to do with the experiences of a "layman listener" (other than a critic). When I wrote this analysis, the challenge was to place the text in the context of the time period through the lens of the music that the author was describing. Mind you, these were purely fictional pieces by a fictional composer which made it even more difficult. But, I was able to complete these tasks so effectively that I was proud of my work.

Then, in the summer of 2015, I had the marvelous opportunity to work with The Borgen Project, and I was assigned an incredibly daunting piece. I had to introduce the members of the 2015 Nigeria Oil and Gas Trade and Investment Forum to readers. I researched each of their websites in great detail to learn about their individual expertise on the subject of the forum. By doing so, I answered the all-too-important question of why they were there. I had never heard these names before I began researching this article, so (with the absence of the ability to put in my own pictures) I decided that the best course of action was to emphasize their place and purpose to encourage readers to learn more about what this group of experts would come up with together. I was thus able to break down a complicated concept. I was able to make my audience aware of what was happening at this event, state its importance, and then reiterate it by talking about those who would be involved.

Finally, from last summer, I dropped out of my comfort zone when I had begun reading articles about America and Anti-Intellectualism. Rather, I had read pieces about Anti-Intellectualist America. I had no idea if the authors of those pieces were using the term correctly. I had only a general sense of what the word meant. The authors of these pieces would always talk about why we are living in Anti-Intellectualist America, and I just felt so uninformed in that moment. I decided, while I was researching it, I might as well propose to write an article about it. I decided not to take a political approach. I needed different applications to be able to understand these terms better. I needed to think about my personal experiences in academia, and things that I had actually seen so I could then apply that knowledge to other things that I had been reading during that time. Now, when I think of intellectualism, I think of a doctrine in which knowledge is gained, understood, applied, and distributed by moral and ethical means. When I think of anti-intellectualism, I think of wanting to hinder the attainment of knowledge and applying knowledge in a way that provokes unethical practice (hatred, prejudice, etc).

It doesn't require abstract high order thinking to be an intellectualist, and neither does it require blatant stupidity to be an anti-intellectualist. It's all a matter of how these individuals frame things, and it is through my research on this topic I found that I was drawn to intellectualists in the media. At around the same time as I was researching this article, I was beginning a series on Doctor Who, my favorite television show of all time. At first, to me, it was just a normal sci-fi show that had to do with time travel. Now I know that it was one of the most historically influential and even one of the most progressive of existing shows, and the reason why I admired The Doctor (the main protagonist) so much was because he is first and foremost an intellectualist. A lot of people don't realize this. He had an entire ideology centered around him that had to do with gathering information about cultures that surrounded them without invading their practices and defeating enemies (the majority of them anti-intellectualists) without using physical force or weaponry, merely the knowledge that he gains ethically by exploring different cultures. He acknowledges every person and every idea that exists as important in some form or fashion.

So, what I did, and I was trying in every way I could to make my purpose clear. I wanted to create a project about Doctor Who using intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, something that I had been doing unintentionally in my article series by analyzing specific episodes. My working title is "The Doctor The Intellectualist." I would like to create a magazine for the purpose of dividing it into articles. In this way, I would be applying the concept of anti-intellectualism and anti-intellectualism to something that's more easily accessible than political discourse. People read political articles with their own views in mind, but people read articles on television shows in quite a different way. Someone who has never seen the show, someone who loves the show, and even someone who doesn't like the show might see merit in something like this.