Reach

The Works of Melissa Danko

Reflection

Upon hearing about the requirements for our second project, the repurposed project, I immediately knew which essay I wanted to work with.  Last semester I took English 225, and my particular section was titled “Hip-Hop Arguments.”  We listened to and analyzed rap songs with the help of scholarly articles that exposed a much deeper side to hip-hop than I had ever known existed.  For my final paper, I wrote an essay about how Macklemore’s “Same Love” goes against typical hip-hop industry ideals of using homophobic slurs and having a predominantly anti-gay stance.  I thoroughly enjoyed writing this essay and challenging myself to use a plethora of scholarly articles and sources, and it is definitely a piece of writing of which I am very proud.

While I knew I loved this essay, I wasn’t sure exactly how I wanted to repurpose it.  Suddenly it came to me—I could attack the issue from the other side and write to the hip-hop artists guilty of using such hurtful language.  I decided to focus on appealing to one artist, who also happens to be my favorite: Eminem.

It felt strange to be writing a letter to Eminem, because I couldn’t just tell him how incredible he is.  I started my letter as a fan letter, praising his skills as not only a rapper, but a writer.  I began my appeal with the idea that his incredible writing skills should enable him to use better words than “faggot.”  One very helpful suggestion that Kelsey and Kaitlin had for me was to get to the point a little sooner.  They both felt that I was a little too heavy on the praise in the beginning, and they suggested that if it were a real appeal to Eminem, he might be confused as to why the letter suddenly switched from praising to preaching.

They also found this problem again at the end, and suggested that I could craft a much stronger ending.  Instead of ending it on a happy note, one that reminded how big of a fan I was, I needed to end with my real reason for writing the letter.  I needed to remind him of my plea one last time.

After making these changes (and many others), I felt really good about my writing.  From there, it was only a matter of formatting my letter into some form that could be published.  After bouncing ideas around people in class, I settled on “publishing” my letter in Rolling Stones magazine, as it could potentially be found in an editorial section.  To do this, I formatted my letter to look like it could be found on the Rolling Stone website.

Overall, I really enjoyed repurposing my essay about Macklemore into a more personal piece of writing.  Prior to this repurposed project, I had little experience with writing in such a personal style for a class.  It was a great experience, and I felt like my voice was much clearer than it could have been in any other stiff academic environment.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.