My name is Lauren Walford and I am
from Kearney, NE. I was really interested in health towards my senior year at
Kearney High School and knew I wanted to work in that field someday. Once I
started college at UNL I chose the major Nutrition, Exercise, and Health Science
and bounced around between different career ideas. Finally, towards the end of
my junior year in college I decided to pursue nursing and I am now in the
process of applying to nursing schools. I am now a senior and I will be
graduating in May and then hopefully attending nursing school. This class is my
last nursing prerequisite, but I am excited to get this opportunity to improve
my writing.
Growing up, I always loved to
write. I remember in 5th grade when our teacher provided us
opportunities to write poems and short stories, which really began my interest
in writing. Each time we were provided with an opportunity to be completely
creative and write about whatever we wanted to that day. I even loved to make
my parents homemade birthday or holiday cards including short poems. Throughout
school I became too involved in sports and other activities to pursue writing
in any serious form besides English class and a handful of Science papers. I
still love to write and sometimes do it just to get out frustrations and relax.
I find when I get really worried or stressed out, I can just start writing
whatever I am feeling and sometimes it’s just my thoughts and other times it
forms into a short story. I love to read as well and find that the more I read,
the more I get inspired to write on my own and inspire people the way that
books have inspired me. I hope to improve my writing so I feel confident enough
to share with others and maybe start writing more consistently. I think a blog
is a great way to start because it’s completely up to you how you write it,
which makes it more enjoyable than writing a paper in school that has strict guidelines.
Writing
is a very important skill to have because it is used in every aspect of life.
This can be seen when evaluating different communities. A community is a group
of people linked through common factors. Some communities I am involved in
include my sorority Alpha Omicron Pi, each of my different classes, the
university as a whole, and my part time job. In the piece of writing by Joseph
Harris, The Idea of Community in the
Study of Writing, he evaluated community as a kind of vague term. This
vagueness includes the potential ability to ‘cross the border’ from one
community discourse to another. Each community contains its own language and
its own ideology, but it is important to be able to be apart of different
communities without feeling out of place because there is overlap everywhere. This
topic is important to think about since we are all involved in a university
setting, including a variety of different communities.
Lauren, I love what positive associations you have maintained with writing! I think for so many of us the work of school, grades, and standardized tests has beaten the love of writing right out of us. I wonder what role you'll find these creative writing skills playing in your nursing career. A friend of mine is a nurse and aside from all the formal writing she does, I think she might suggest that the way you interact with and talk to patients is a form of writing--it's the way you tell the story of their health to them. This could be a really interesting way to think about discourse and discourse community.
ReplyDeleteBeyond the idea of community being vague, how do you see community as being important? How do you see it and discourse communities playing out in your life? For example, at work where do you see discourse communities in action?