Ashley and Her Writing

Hello! My name is Ashley Rad and I am studying Communication at Southern Oregon University. I decided to attend SOU in 2019 as I had an older sibling who previously attended the school and I also quickly fell in love with the area and of course the beautiful campus! I chose to declare my major as Communications as I have always had a passion and interest in media, commercials, and marketing. Communication seemed like the perfect fit for me and I have now been studying it for almost three years. I have really enjoyed all the COMM classes I have taken so far and enrolled in COMM 206 Multimedia Writing. I have never really been a strong writer and this was the first time I was tasked with a more journalistic style of class. At the beginning of this class, I struggled with keeping up with the due dates and working on a more creative and informative style of writing. Throughout the term, I believe that my writing has improved a bit and I have learned a lot about interviewing, researching, and the importance of embedded links. Now that the class is close to end, I went through my past submissions on Medium and picked out five of my favorite assignments I had done so far with the goal of revising them to their fullest potential.

The first assignment I chose to revise was America Isn’t so American. I picked this one as it was one of the earlier writing assignments and I really enjoyed all the research I did pertaining to the assignment. This piece of writing is also very important to me as it covers the horrible event on January 6th, 2021, and how we as a society need to do better than that. While revising this story I rewrote most of the beginning and made sure it had a nice flow and all the correct spelling and grammar. To follow up with that story I reviewed A Not So Great America, although this is my shortest story on medium I wanted to add a bit more to it along with correcting some of the errors, I picked this story as it is relevant to America Isn’t so American and it felt right to edit both. The third story I chose was The Future of Education, since moving to Ashland Oregon I felt very passionate about becoming more involved in the community, and being able to educate myself about what is going on locally is important to me. For this story, I researched local news, specifically the big steps Grants Pass School District is making in remote learning. This story didn’t need much editing but I did make a few grammar and spelling corrections. Out of all the assignments I decided to revise I thought I would work on my least favorite of all, Partners in Crime. I like the topic I wrote about and I have always been interested in crime stories and facts. The biggest issue I found in this story was how much I repeated the same thing, I went back through and rewrote almost the whole thing and tried to make it flow better. I think it now reads better and makes more sense. Finally, I revised my longest story, Gaming and the Brain. I really enjoyed working on this story as I love gaming and everything about it. For this story, I had to fix a few sentences and grammar errors of course. All and all I am really proud of myself and all the writing I accomplished, it was nice to go past my comfort zone and improve my writing skills.