Welcome to, alas, another blog post. This one was really exciting for me. 

Who am I as a writer? This was where we started. What makes me, me? What do I want to write about? What do I enjoy writing about? This was something we had to do in class but I found it much more useful to think about this on my own time. I think, at my core, I live to help other people. So I knew right away that I wanted to share my own experiences in order to help others understand and hopefully change their minds. 

Now once we had an idea of who we were, we had to learn from others. This learning revolved around how people make change though writing. We looked at some essays written with the goal to persuade someone of an idea. 

Exploring topic and audience is never challenging for me. I know who I am. I read “Find Your Why” by Simon Sinek at the ripe age of 11 and haven’t looked back since. Once I found out about this project I had a million ideas.   

Now that I had an idea, I had to learn ways to use language to express it. The way we did this was to study the “6+1 Writing Traits”. Honestly, I understand why we needed to learn this but I found that I learned way more from studying the essays and hearing peoples feedback. I wrote down in my craft some of that feedback. When the time came to asses what I had written, I looked back at my craft document and tried to apply what people had said about other persuasive writings to my own. I found that invaluable.  

I always value peer critique. I find valuable critique a really important part of any project. Having the opportunity to receive it in PLP is one of my favourite things about the program. I worked with Thomas and Kaia to improve upon each other’s work. I give good feedback and I think I helped my group members to clean up their work. I got some good advice on which sections needed some more work and fixed them up the best I could. 

Now, you might be thinking, “Zoe, isn’t this usually where you write the conclusion to your posts? We’ve heard about your learning!” Aha! That, my friend, is where you are wrong. Because I was so passionate about this project, I wanted to go an extra step. Instead of leaving my ideas with one, semi like-minded person, I decided to share it with the people who I identified as having the ability to solve the problem. 

I shared my post with people on my cycling team and opened up some really valuable conversations. Sharing these conversations would have been ideal, but I’d like those to remain private for now. What I can share, is that I’m not the only one who feels this way about women in sport. Opportunities should be evenly distributed.

Overall, I found this project to be something I both learned from and found value in.

Thanks for reading.