Hello! My name is Alyson Woodward, I’m eighteen years old, and I am studying to be a psych major at Western Washington University, with a possible minor in some field of education. At the moment, writing is important in my life mostly because of school and assignments. I write all the time on social media, but I don’t do much writing for pleasure other than that. I used to write for fun a lot more when I was young. I would always keep a journal and either explain my day or draw a picture of something I saw that stuck with me. In the future, I want to start writing more for pleasure again. My thoughts get mixed up really easily and writing is a good way for me to sort my mind out and organize all of my ideas.
Being in English 101 has taught me that writing can actually be fun and not just five paragraph persuasive essays. I lost my love for writing through middle school and high school when we were constantly writing formal essays, and being in this class has reminded me of how much I enjoy writing just for me. Specifically, our first project, the Literacy Narrative, sparked this change for me. This narrative was the first piece of writing I had done for myself as an assignment in a very long time. It was weird how challenging I found it to write something about myself. I thought it would be easy, but because I’ve gotten so used to writing essays, I forgot how to write for fun or about me personally. I’m very much a visual learner, and I need to see an example before I do an assignment, so I think that’s another reason why that assignment was so hard for me. Once I learned how to write a formal essay, it was the same format over and over again, and I never had to worry about if I was doing something wrong. When I’m writing creatively, it’s hard to get affirmation that what I’m writing is “correct” because in a lot of ways, creative writing isn’t necessarily right or wrong.
My partner and I’s webtext is on how listening to music affects students while they are taking tests. Music has always been really important to me. Personally, I study, do assignments, and test better when I’m listening to music. I’m always planning ahead so there’s usually a lot going on in my head. Listening to music distracts me from how much I’m constantly thinking so I can focus on what I’m supposed to be doing, and I was interested to see if other people felt or performed the same way. We liked the ides of our website being clear, straightforward, and easy to navigate. We chose mostly a black and white theme, with pops of colors in some of the pictures to make them stand out. We also made sure all of our images are accessible and didn’t add any extra headings or subtitles. We organized our menu so readers can easily navigate our website and learn about our research process in a similar order to how we conducted it.