The best part about humans is how different we all are. I love how everyone’s humour, point of view, and way of thinking can vary so much, yet somehow, we find people who compliment who we are – people who bring out our best parts and help us through the worst.

So, of course, everyone has a voice. It’s a powerful thing. Being able to harness it is what makes it a weapon. In this project, we learned how to develop our voices and bring them into our writing – to make our writing powerful, intentional, and most importantly, personal. Our end result was to be a writing piece of our choice.

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All the thinking, consuming and learning we do influences the way we write. The books I’ve read, the conversations I’ve had, and even the random things I’ve scrolled past online all find their way into my thoughts and writing in some form. Sometimes, seemingly opposite ideas collide in our brains and create unexpected connections that make our work even stronger – that’s the cool part ’bout learning. In order to actually hold onto those thoughts, the ones floating around and buried in the corners of our mind we took another look at our ever-growing zettelkastens. 

Quick reminder: a zettelkasten is basically a way of organizing thoughts and ideas. Everybody’s zettelkasten is different, for me mine is separated into folders:

Then the subjects :

Then the projects:

This system works well for me as I can navigate it and it keeps things organized. But the magic of my zettelkasten isn’t the amazing use of folders, it’s in the tagging system. 

When we first learned about crafting our zettelkasten’s there was a lot of emphasis on the use of tags. Craft allows you to create tags like this: 

Tags are about the main ideas of the piece of writing. So when I finish writing something, I take a second to think about the biggest ideas, takeaways, or key points in the passage and add a few tags to the bottom of my note. For example, I read an article about a Cree woman naming her kids traditional Cree names. It was a really powerful piece about reclaiming heritage and identity. The tags I used are in the picture above, you can read the article and my literature note here. Over time, as I create notes and use more tags, everything starts connecting. Idea’s I didn’t even realize were related start linking together, and suddenly, I have a concrete web of thoughts that can support and strengthen my writing. 

My problem with my zettelkasten was knowing the difference between the notes I wrote. At first, I thought I had a solid grasp on permanent notes… until I realized that what I was calling a permanent note was actually just a really well-developed literature note. A half win I guess.

So here’s how I finally made sense of it:

• Literature notes: the stuff I take in when consuming something – my thoughts, quotes or ideas I take away from what I am reading or watching. Doesn’t have to be super polished. 
• Permanent notes: singular, stand-alone ideas that come from my literature notes. The key word here is singular. Each permanent note focuses on one core idea, and is generally pretty short. Since it is backed up by my literature notes, it ends up being strong and well-supported. For an example of my permanent notes click here.

By the end of this benchmark, I wasn’t just organizing my thoughts better – I was actually sharpening my voice, making my writing more intentional and clear by learning how to take all those scattered ideas and turn them into something powerful. 

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Now, I knew how to begin the process of great writing. But, like I said, this project wasn’t just about organization, it was about personalizing our writing. I think now, especially with AI, writing has become more impersonal and flat. Carrying on, we focused on learning how to bring our voices into our writing, which honestly, can be a challenge. 

To help with that, we did a few exercizes in class to just have fun with our writing. The one I liked the most was the six boxes exercise. 

We each folded a piece of paper into six boxes, and in each box, we wrote down a part of our identity – different aspects of who we are. Then, for each part, we wrote five memories attached to it. This is what my paper looked like:

This exercise got me thinking about all the things that have influenced who I am. These are the stories I tell others, the things that connect me with people, and the experiences that have taught me lessons. I wouldn’t act, speak or engage with the world the way I do without them. I ended up using one of these prompts as the foundation for my final writing piece. 

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As I said, our final writing piece could kind of be anything we wanted. We picked an exercise we did in class to base it on. I chose the photographer section of the box exercise, specifically focusing on my photography teacher, Janet. I decided to write a short reflective piece because it felt like the best way to get my voice across. 

But having all the elements of good writing isn’t enough – you have to know how to put them together and refine them. Throughout this project we analyzed articles and compared them to multiple rubrics about sentence fluency, word choices, persuasiveness etc. As I wrote my writing piece I referenced them which gave me clear guidelines and a standard to uphold, but ultimately, it was up to me to bring my writing to life. With all these things in mind, I started writing.

The key to making your writing the best it can be? drafts, drafts, drafts. Revise that stuff, man! Ask your friends, get feedback from peers, run it through AI if you want, and most importantly (at least for me), read it out loud to yourself. Hearing your own words out loud helps catch awkward phrasing, choppy sentences, and places where things just don’t flow.

I was on a bit of a time crunch because I lost two days of work time. I wrote my first draft, got three of my friends to edit it, took their feedback, asked my mom, checked for grammar, had one more person give feedback, and then called it a day.

I got a good amount of feedback and utilized it all, but I didn’t have enough time to make bigger, structural in depth changes. I really wished I had more time to revise, but I am proud of what I wrote. The main thing I focused on was making sure it flowed – I didn’t want it to be clunky or disconnected. I believe I did a good job at that and it really helped get my voice and emotion across. Here was my final draft:

Everything I said in my writing piece is authentically true to me. Moving forward, I will keep refining my voice in my writing, making sure that no matter what I write, it feels like me and I am proud of it. 

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