Conversations with 2020–2021 Writing Flag Award Winners
The School of Undergraduate Studies Writing Flag Award honors the best writing produced by University of Texas at Austin undergraduates in courses carrying the Writing Flag. Prizes are awarded to student work that best demonstrates clarity, inventiveness, and intellectual rigor.
We recently spoke with three winners of the most recent Writing Flag Awards about the importance of rigorous flag criteria in writing coursework, their strengths and challenges while crafting their award-winning pieces, and what it means to grow as a writer.
In Fall 2020, Elyssa Sefiane (Bachelor of Arts, Middle Eastern Studies & Religious Studies, Arabic, 2024) wrote her First Place award-winning piece in the Critical/Persuasive category while historical roleplaying in Dr. Julie Casey’s course, “Reacting to the Past.” Specifically, she was required to write as an Athenian Assembly-member, with the goal of convincing his fellow countrymen of the merit of giving women some measure of political agency — either through suffrage or the formation of a women’s council.
“While this character is imagined — and the radical nature of his feminist ideas are in reality anachronistic to that time period — his position as an Indeterminate Assembly-member whose sole aim was to push a single-issue agenda is based on legitimate figures who existed at the time and were some of the first participants in a democratic system,” says Sefiane. “While I don’t necessarily agree with every stance the character I roleplayed as takes (he was fairly progressive for his time but still outdated in many ways), I enjoyed the challenge of exploring complex topics through the viewpoints of someone else and experimenting with writing in a voice other than my own.”
Throughout the full course, students were presented with several major philosophical texts and their historical contexts through reenactments of policy debates. Students worked to capture the essence of these debates by composing speeches, essays, and persuasive letters from the perspective of the historical debaters. “Assuming the role of a historical figure doesn’t come naturally, so forming these arguments takes a lot of effort,” Sefiane says.
Considering that inherent difficulty in crafting an ancient voice, she also notes that the rigorous revision process of a Writing Flag course better allowed her to root out too-modern, and thus contradictory, rhetoric in her draft.
“It was only with careful revision that I was able to be more mindful of my own biases and rework them to better reflect a historically accurate argument based on persuasion tactics that were more likely to have been used in Athens in 403 B.C.E.”
Sefiane finds the beginning of a writing project to be fairly tedious and so, she says, her work comes in “sporadic bursts offset by very long breaks in between in order to appease my ADHD.” However, once she builds up enough momentum, she can hyperfocus and finish an assignment in one sitting.
“I really struggle with getting my first thoughts out onto the page. I think it’s because I always want everything to sound perfect right away or to have my thoughts all fully collected before I start taking them down, even though time has proven again and again that I rarely ever know the full extent of what I’m thinking until I’ve put it on paper. I am still working on ways to get through this hold-up, but the biggest help I have found so far is word-dumping — this method of just spewing whatever comes to mind first onto the page in an unstructured and uninhibited way helps to relieve any pressure I feel about starting a piece. As long as I just focus on making it manageable and not perfect, it can be as ugly and unintelligible as it needs to be until I am able to get through the rough patch at the beginning and chisel it into something better.”
Sefiane’s personal tastes in writing particularly draws her to “lyrical stories that blur the lines between prose and poetry” and “stories that grapple with theological questions and internal conflict related to faith or religious practice.” Some of her favorites are Miguel de Unamuno’s short novel San Manuel Bueno, mártir and Silence by Shūsaku Endō.
To win his First Place award in the Research–Lab category, Christopher Dean (Bachelor of Science, Chemical Engineering, 2023) co-wrote a paper about an incident at a chemical plant that hospitalized many people — including an analysis of what went wrong, how certain actors violated safety protocols and ethical guidelines, and what important lessons could be learned from the incident and applied to promote safety in similar situations.
“I think safety is something everyone understands generally, but many younger engineering students or engineers have a perspective of trusting the company and people they work for to have flawless safety systems in place,” says Dean. “In essence, if a system is in place already it must be safe. This leads many younger engineers to avoid thinking critically about what safety changes ought to be made at their place of work, depriving them of experience in advancing safety.”
Dean co-wrote this piece for Dr. D’Arcy Randall’s course. “Chemical Engineering Communications.” Students read several instances of engineering-related safety and ethical failures — including the Buffalo Creek flood in West Virginia and the Bhopal disaster with Union Carbide in India — as well as a philosopher’s take on what it means to be an ethical engineer, which examined the Columbia shuttle disaster.
Along with the significant reading assignments and in-class discussions, Dean sees the frequency of writing in a Writing Flag course as a critical element for skillset evolution.
“Regular writing throughout the semester allows students to improve from feedback. If you just write something one time, even with general advice from a professor or TA throughout the semester, you do not know whether you have implemented those learnings in your writing until you receive direct feedback.”
A rigorous schedule of writing can be challenging for someone like Dean, who has a natural tendency to write slowly and think a great deal about each sentence, even on the first draft. He feels that writing quickly and editing afterwards is more efficient but is still working on wholly adopting that skill.
“You never write as clearly or concisely as you want to write. The writer becomes too intimate with their own writing, so getting other perspectives on what points are coming through is probably the most important thing one can do in revision. It’s always good to be vigilant about saying the same thing with fewer words.”
Recent alum Saba Rahimian (Bachelor of Journalism, 2020) has a longstanding fascination with the gap between environmentalists and outdoor recreators along the Texas coastline, including their constant confrontations with oil and gas companies; this is the basis of her First Place award-winning piece in the Research — Humanities category: “Gulf Coast Vigil.”
“That piece was my academic magnum opus, a culmination of all the skills I had learned centered around a topic I really care about: environmental degradation in the wake of industrial development.”
Rahimian wrote the piece for Professor Tracy Dahlby’s “Long-Form Narrative Journalism,” in which she learned how to “be out in the world and chase the story I wanted to find.” She spent four months reporting, re-reporting, keeping tabs on changes, writing outlines, rewriting outlines, and moving with the story as it changed over time.
“I was pushed to read a lot in this class and to draw from inspiring writers while also finding my own voice,” she says. “I was also gifted the opportunity to work with a professor who was honest, gave feedback in the most no-nonsense yet gentle way, and stuck with me until the best version of the story came out. I also had the opportunity to work with other talented writers who helped me improve my own writing.”
Through the layered reporting process and multiple revisions, Rahimian also learned that she is a macro thinker, consumed by the big picture. “In order to improve my writing, I have to slow down and dissect my own work by shining a magnifying glass on specific sections,” she says. “I learned to treat each subsection as its own story with its own purpose and narrative. Then, I could take myself back to the whole. I also learned I need editors. I am messy because my mind moves much faster than I can type. An extra set of eyes is key.”
But despite her personal opinion that she is messy, Rahimian uses a rather structured method to begin the writing process — first forming an outline followed by extensive information gathering.
“Once I feel like I have enough information, I write quickly,” she says. “Then I go through it over and over again. I take a fine-tooth comb approach on different sections of the piece. I put it all out in front of me on my floor and see how it all connects at the very end.”
Rahimian’s favorite journalism comes from The Atlantic, National Geographic, and New York Magazine, but she’s not sure it’s possible to choose a favorite book.
“Choosing a favorite book is like choosing a favorite song, I don’t think I have one so I will just go with the first one that pops in my head — Joan Didion’s South & West.”
Applications are now open for the 2021–2022 Writing Flag Awards; qualifying pieces may be from any undergraduate course carrying a Writing Flag taken in Spring, Summer, or Fall of 2021. More information is available on the Center for Skills and Experience website.
