Ashley S. Williams

My process as a writer varies depending on the assignment. I like to write lists, or short answers to questions to help me get started writing. I have been working diligently on outlining papers and assignments. I think that I need more help organizationally. I am familiar with many different techniques to help organize pre writing such as actually writing and seeing what works, concept maps like ven diagrams, and outlining. I used concept maps when I was younger, and I think that when I got to college I forgot about how those helped me in the past. These days, I like outlining, but I find that it's hard to tell what should go where until you actually include it in the piece itself. I won't know that some part of a paper is out of place until I read the entire thing and see that it doesn't fit in in that particular spot. 

The This I Believe project was easy for prewriting because I knew that I would have to explain a lot of things. I knew tha I would have to break down white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy, and also multi racial white supremacy. I knew that it didn't matter which order I explained those things in, but that it had to come before the why I believe what I believe. This is one project where I paid a lot of attention to my audience. I wanted everyone to know what I was talking about and I knew I would have an issue with this during class discussion when I had the opportunity to tell everyone what I was doing my project on. I did not realize that most people didn't know what those things meant. I now realize it's because those things are all that I ever learn about, and so of course they make sense to me. This process helped me because I had to really consider my audience and make sure that I was being understood. It's easy to come up with things to say for something that you feel passionately about.