The People Behind the Stories: Conversations with the 2021 Writing Flag Award Winners
The School of Undergraduate Studies Writing Flag Award honors the best writing produced by University of Texas at Austin undergraduate students produced in courses with the Writing Flag. Prizes are awarded to student work that best demonstrates clarity, inventiveness, and intellectual rigor. This year there were 280 submissions across the four individual categories: Critical/Persuasive, Humanities Research, Lab Research and Creative/Reflective.
These winners were honored on April 4 at an award ceremony, where they were recognized for their hard work and received prizes totaling over $2,000. Additionally, their prize-winning papers were published on the Texas ScholarWorks database, which is maintained by the UT Libraries staff and is designed to provide open, online access to help preserve works of University research and scholarship for future generations.
When asked what makes for a successful submission, Senior Program Coordinator and Curriculum Specialist for the Writing Flag, Dr. Susan “George” Schorn vocalizes how difficult the selection process is:
“It’s hard to sum up what ‘successful’ looks like because we see so many versions of excellence. Some winning entries are extremely polished; some are less so, but nonetheless authoritative or heartfelt. Some tackle extremely complex disciplinary questions. Others are striking because of the author’s reflective or inventive efforts. Some of this depends on the category and type of writing, some of it is due to the assignment the student wrote in response to — but winning pieces tend to stand out because of the author’s enthusiasm for their subject, and the confidence with which they engage the reader.”
We sat down with three of this year’s Writing Flag Award winners to learn more about their challenges and lessons learned in drafting their award-winning manuscripts, their views on the importance of the Writing Flag, and how their experiences helped develop their own writing skills.
*Answers have been edited for length, clarity, and context.*
Critical/Persuasive
This year’s Writing Flag Award Winner in the Critical/Persuasive category is 19-year old Urban Studies major Grace Xu. Grace is a Freshman from Dallas, and wrote “The Contradictions of Containing the Infinite in the Fun Palace” in Dr. Bryan Norwood’s ARC 318L: World Architecture: Industrial Revolution to the Present. Grace’s essay is a critical analysis of Cedric Price’s eccentric and ambitious Fun Palace project. She argues that despite Price’s efforts to build a space without restrictions, the logistical realities that would have to be addressed with the successful completion of his project would innately contradict his ideas.
Why did you choose your topic?
I was interested in reading about how Utopian ideas influence architecture, which is what drew me to the Fun Palace. I am fascinated by the separation between reality and unreachable ideals.
Would you kindly describe your writing process?
I spent a lot of time — far more than I first thought — just thinking about my topic. I spent a considerable amount of time brainstorming and even spoke a number of times with Dr. Norwood for both advice and feedback. Despite this, I still had to push through feelings of anxiety I got prior to producing a tangible enough product for refining and manipulation. After that, I like to get someone with a neutral perspective to look at my writing, and I typically share my products with close friends to get their thoughts and feedback.
What struggles did you face in writing your piece? What part are you most proud of?
Despite the fact that I have been writing since high school, I still get feelings of panic when I have to actually sit down and write. Especially at the beginning, I tend to feel overwhelmed because I feel like I struggle to produce something which expresses everything I want to express to the degree I want to express it. I am thankful for the support of my professor and my friends in helping me process these feelings of anxiety, and am very proud of myself for producing a piece that adequately expresses ideas that I’m truly interested in.
What is the key takeaway you want people to have from this piece?
Ironically, just the opposite point I argue in my paper: I want readers to feel more secure in assigning their own meaning to events and objects in their own lives.
Why do you think the Writing Flag is important for students?
I think there’s a lot to learn in the writing process. While the process can be different for everyone, my process taught me a great deal about myself. Even a simple critique of architectural theories forces me to be more introspective, to think critically, and discover what I really care about.
Humanities Research
Andrew Wang from Houston is the 2021 Winner in the Humanities Research category. Originally from Chongqing, China, Andrew is a second-year Electrical Engineering student working on a pre-Health Professionals Certification. Andrew wrote a fantastic paper called “Surrendering Death to Pain: Comparing Mortal Theomachy in the Iliad and Near Eastern Religions” in Dr. Adam Rabinowitz’s UGS 302: Tales from the Trojan War class. His paper analyzes the extent to which Homer was influenced by Mesopotamian religion as he penned the Iliad, and how those influences shaped how he presented the Greek pantheon.
Why did you choose your topic?
As I read and studied the Iliad, the degree to which Homer humanized his gods, especially in battle, struck me as quite peculiar and different from other religious texts. While brainstorming for the research assignment, I told Dr. Rabinowitz that this feature of mortal theomachy was especially fascinating to me. He suggested several ways in which I can explore this topic, including comparing the Iliad with Mesopotamian texts, which I found to be a good perspective to use for the essay.
Would you kindly describe your writing process?
The writing process began with several weeks of looking through digital libraries and databases. I was happy to find ample archaeological and linguistic evidence for the cultural exchange between ancient Greece and Mesopotamia. To my surprise, however, I failed to find any example of mortal struggles against gods in Mesopotamian epics. I felt frustrated and discouraged for a few days, before realizing that this lack of findings was itself a discovery. This absence of mortal theomachy in Mesopotamian religion became the foundation of the paper, and I expanded this idea by explaining why this is the case and what it reveals about both ancient Greek and Mesopotamian religions.
Even knowing what to write, the process was not all smooth sailing. I do not have much experience writing essays of this length, and it was certainly grueling at times. Thankfully, there were several rounds of revision and plenty of opportunities to receive feedback from both peers and the professor. Through this process, I expanded the scope of the essay to not only consider Mesopotamian texts, but also Hebrew and Hittite religions. And the language of the essay was streamlined to be more clear and coherent.
What struggles did you face in writing your piece? What part are you most proud of?
The most frequent struggle I have with writing is simply starting. Even when I have already gathered the evidence and formed an outline, it can feel intimidating to start a longer piece of writing. I often feel scared of making mistakes and end up spending too long trying to sound “just right”. Although it remains a point of struggle for me, I have learned to circumvent this problem by starting with body paragraphs that I feel more comfortable about before returning to the introduction.
I believe the findings in my essay to be fairly novel. Exploring ancient texts from my own perspective and discovering patterns that I did not expect to find is a highly satisfying process and something that I’m proud of.
What is the key takeaway you want people to have from this piece?
The key takeaways from the paper are the interconnectedness between different cultures and the vibrancy of human imagination. People and societies have always influenced and learned from each other. At the same time, individuals continue to form new ideas and perspectives through which they view the world around them. I find this to be invigorating, and it encourages me to continue learning and exploring in my own way.
Why do you think the Writing Flag is important for students?
The Writing Flag is important for students because communication skills are crucial no matter which field we go into. These classes give us both the practice necessary to develop our method and style, and the legroom to produce longer works that allow us to fully expand on our ideas. While my writing flag classes thus far demand a lot of time and effort, I have found them to be enriching and worthwhile, especially as an engineering student that doesn’t usually write much.
Creative/Reflective
Rosie Khan from Austin is the 2021 Winner in the Creative/Reflective category. Rosie is 20-years old, quintuple-majored in Plan II Honors, Government, Economics, International Relations & Global Studies, and Asian Languages & Cultures — Chinese, and is set to graduate this coming May. She wrote her award-winning paper “A Case for Holding On” in Dr. Matthew Valentine’s T C 358: Writing Narratives class. Rosie’s essay centers around suitcases, and how her luggage has played a distinctive role in some of her most vivid memories.
Why did you choose your topic?
My essay, which I wrote for Professor Valentine’s “Writing Narratives” course, centers around the topic of ‘suitcases’. When we were asked to choose a meaningful object to center the essay around, I initially struggled. One of my classmates actually encouraged me to think about important life moments and about things that were with me in those moments. I immediately thought of my transformative travel experiences.
Would you kindly describe your writing process?
I’ve always liked to pick an unexpected opening line or to start my narrative in media res. Similarly, I feel like my writing process works much the same. For this assignment, I thought about some of my most vivid memories that involved suitcases, and interspersed them with backstory, family history, and quotes, until it gave the reader the experience I wanted of skipping between flashbacks, reflections, and rhetorical questions. After this particular essay was done, I received feedback from my professor and peers through a workshop in Writing Narratives class, which gave me insights for revision that strengthened the piece.
What struggles did you face in writing your piece? What part are you most proud of?
I had so many things I wanted to include in this essay — I struggled trying to fit them neatly into my narrative. The essay itself touches on the history of suitcases, the carrier bag theory of fiction, carrying family trauma, nostalgia, anxiety, and so on. Also, my writing voice is not my speaking voice, so I didn’t know how the tone of the essay was going to work.
So, consider my surprise and joy when my classmates gave glowing feedback on how the essay had made them look at suitcases in a completely new way, or how my descriptions of music (reveal: it’s the piano notes in the opening of “Buzzcut Season” by Lorde) were relatable and evocative.
What is the key takeaway you want people to have from this piece?
The major theme throughout the piece seeks to highlight how the collective loneliness, sense of loss, and longing to return to normal endured during the pandemic was a shared experience. I wrote this essay in the Spring 2021 semester — which was fully web-based for me — and I wanted to capture what I was thinking and feeling at the time. I knew that my life would change (e.g. my friends and I see each other daily and I have ear piercings now), but this feeling was too important to forget, so I wrote it down. Ultimately, the message I want people to hold onto is written in my essay’s conclusion: I am allowed to be satisfied with existing and healing imperfectly.
Why do you think the Writing Flag is important for students?
My first reaction when I found out that I had won this award was “oh my god, they liked the essay I wrote about suitcases,” but of course this essay is about a lot more than that, and having a deeply personal project recognized by the University is a wonderful way to encourage students to keep on writing. Students are expected to write a great deal in high school, but it’s often rigidly structured and not fun. Now as a college student here at the University of Texas at Austin, I feel Writing Flag courses allow more freedom to choose topics and voices that appeal to us — which motivated me to do my best.
