Profile Article
Our assignment was to interview a fellow classmate named Zebenay on an essay she wrote about the sponsors in her life for a class assignment. We were tasked to ask follow up questions based on her essay and learn about what she wanted to do in her future career, and how that was affected by her sponsors. During our interview we focused a lot on learning more about how her sponsors affected her writing through the criticism she was given. In Zebenays essay she wrote about the feeling of losing her voice in her writing and how she often felt ashamed of her writing because of how much her writing would be edited by her teachers. In her academic life her sponsors were mainly her teachers and one of her most impactful teachers was her first grade teacher because that was the teacher that encouraged her the most to read different books and authors and enhance her grammar and writing style, along with her love for reading. During her essay and our interview we also discussed how she enjoys reading and how she was first introduced to reading through a reading program called Star.
Zebenay would often turn her work in, just to get it back with so many red marks and changes that she couldn’t hear her voice in her work anymore. Her voice has always been important to her, so it was a big deal when her writing didn’t sound like her anymore. She mentioned that when she speaks to people that are also african american and women, her writing changes, and this more natural way of communication for her is her voice, and when it gets edited to sound more like standard english, the problem arises. When she speaks to people that are similar to her, unspoken agreements and assumptions play a huge role in conversations and changes the dynamic within their relationship and diction “When I’m writing for me or when I’m writing for someone like me and similar to me and is going to understand what I mean, then I do filter out things like how it made me feel when someone made a racist joke or something like that”. During the interview she said “sometimes I just feel like I have to filter out some of the things I’m feeling”, this was in response to her talking about the language changes she experiences when talking to other African American women. She was able to relate heavily to a famous author who goes by the pen name of bell hooks in this aspect, because they are in very similar situations. “I could relate to her feeling somewhat self-conscious about changing her style of writing based on her audience or feeling like her writing couldn’t be understood by everyone”. This whole process has made Zebenay mindfully change how she speaks and writes, allowing her to pay closer attention to her audience and who she’s trying to speak to through her writing. She was forced to learn at a young age that not everyone will relate to the words she writes or how she goes about writing. This caused her to change and learn when to say certain words and to be mindful of who she’s speaking to because as Zebenay said she felt like her writing couldn’t be understood by everyone, making her need to change how she writes and speaks to her peers and community.
Zebenay spoke about how she always felt she had a large array of sponsors, but never the right ones that allowed her to write more freely. This restriction hasn’t allowed her to write what she wants, and only in the confines of the prompt and format. At one point in the interview she mentions “the way I viewed it was I’m not writing for myself at this point, I’m just writing for them”. This really stuck out to me because it marks a big shift in her literacy journey. This box she was placed in, limited her creativity in her writing, and made her lose interest in really writing the way she wanted to.
Her confidence took hits as well when she got her papers back heavily edited. “when you write you write with your voice and in my opinion at that time I didn’t really feel like my voice was seen as intelligent because I spoke differently than my peers, or at least how my teacher wanted me to”. Eventually she realized that you don’t have to talk or write a certain way to be considered intelligent. This is going to be helpful for her confidence in her future career because we learned that she wants to be an OBGYN and having more confidence in herself will be major in the healthcare profession. Having confidence in yourself and your intelligence when going into a healthcare profession will help her with progressing further as an OBGYN.
Throughout this whole process we learned more about how Zebenay was affected by her sponsors and how these experiences changed her writing throughout the years. We learned more about how she viewed her writing and how her writing changed through her years of writing and the changes and loss of her voice. The discussions about her limits on creativity and diction, and the causes of her fear and self-consciousness in her writing. Even through all of this she still managed to regain her voice later on in her academic career, she knew that when she was growing up and learning through her past teachers she shouldn’t fight the battles of her writing and instead she wrote in the way her teachers wanted to get a good grade and further advance her career as a student and a writer. Through all of this she learned that she didn’t have to talk in a certain way to please others, because there’s no set way of talking or writing that everyone has to follow.
