My entire writing career (and I say career in the loosest meaning of the term) I have been chastised again and again for writing too casually. “It’s good writing,” teachers would say “but not nearly formal enough for the prompt you were assigned”. So when my English teacher told us that we would be creating a blog, an outlet where writing is encouraged to be casual, I nearly jumped for joy. Even better? We would be revising one of our former essays into a blog post (AKA goodbye big words, hello personable expressions).
My essay, as you may have guessed from my previous post, focused on encouraging women to succeed in school despite the barriers society creates for us. It was a full six pages filled with not only my own opinions, but numerous quotes from well-known feminists such as Sheryl Sandberg and Anne Marie Slaughter. It’s point?
That “Even today, in a time where women have just as much access to education as men, too many girls feel the need to downplay their IQ and by default lack the motivation to excel in a school or work setting.”
During my revision process I wanted to make sure, that even though I was shortening my essay, it still had the same impact. I’ll admit this part was actually quite challenging for me. How could I delete certain parts of my arguments and still make strong points? And further more which parts did I delete to begin with?
The first thing I eliminated was a paragraph on women who attended college strictly for what one might jokingly a “MRS.” degree. While the paragraph was humorous and does unfortunately still ring very true in society (trust me I know, I’m a 19 year old girl with a lot of 19 year old girl friends) it was by far my least convincing argument and also slightly repetitive. Additionally, I also removed many quotes from speakers I used, such as Michelle Obama and Freeman Hrabowski, who talked about strictly education with little regard of women.
The next step to making my essay a blog worthy success was making it interesting. Sure my essay was interesting if you were passionate about female education or their impact in the workforce, but beyond that why would you want to read a full six pages of me complaining about society? Oh that’s right, you wouldn’t.
First step? Finding my voice. Yes arguments are persuasive when said in a formal tone, but they’re also far less interesting. In order to truly connect with a broad audience and get my point across in a personable way I needed to talk to my readers the way I would talk to a friend. This, which was my favorite part of the revision process, entailed adding in numerous sarcastic or rhetorical comments, loosening my language choice, and removing the overly formal sentence structure that I would never actually use while speaking. For me this was all pretty easy, since I tend to try and write like this anyway, but I did have to keep in mind that grammar was still important. Even though writing in a blog is casual, it does still have to be grammatically correct for your readers to follow along without getting confused.
In addition to making the essay more interesting through my writing style, I also added many pictures and pop culture references to intrigue my readers. By referencing and providing pictures of specific “nerdy girl” characters that appear in TV and movies, I was providing my readers with concrete examples that they remember from their youth. By doing this they not only understand my argument, but can relate to it on a personal level. Additionally, I made sure to add a picture of Gymboree’s “Pretty like Mommy” shirt at the top of my article to immediately catch my viewers eye. These visuals and the ones like them are used to separate large chunks of words that would otherwise be boring.
Lastly, I needed to make sure my essay was formatted like a blog post. I did my best to split my paragraphs into smaller chunks and use both italics and bold fonts to catch the reader’s eye. I also used hyperlinks, an online alternative to a bibliography, to provide my readers with background knowledge on my topic incase they wanted it. Lastly I chose the title, “Pretty like Mommy”, because it not only referenced a specific example of gender bias I provided in my article:
“In 2011 Gymboree sold onesies saying “Smart like Daddy” for boys and “Pretty like Mommy” for girls.”
But symbolized the point of my entire entry: that society enforces the idea that a girl’s worth is based solely on her looks from the time she is born.
All of these things together helped to shape what was a six page essay into a short, sweet, and hopefully compelling argument about gender equality. While this assignment was far trickier than expected, I had a genuinely good time completing it and can’t wait to write even more blog posts from here!