In this essay, Vo shows that personal and critical reflection can build on one another to great persuasive effect. Linking… Continue reading Taking Comfort in Conspiracy Thinking
Writing Category: Student Essay Awards
Revisiting Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City: the Broader Effects of Incarceration on African American Communities
Judson’s essay cleverly weaves together readings of three main sources: Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010), Kendrick Lamar’s album,good… Continue reading Revisiting Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City: the Broader Effects of Incarceration on African American Communities
the undercommons: Black ecologies and Atlantic portals
Smith’s powerful essay joins lyrical first-person writing with critical reflection in order to argue “for a remembering of the Atlantic… Continue reading the undercommons: Black ecologies and Atlantic portals
Closing the Distance: From Collapse to Collection in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
Goebels uses Jenny Odell’s New York Times bestseller, Doing Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019), as a lens through which… Continue reading Closing the Distance: From Collapse to Collection in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
Are Bad Trips a First World Problem? The Path to Centering the Indigenous Perspective in the “Psychedelic Renaissance”
Calling attention to a gap in scholarship on bad trips among users of psychedelics, Shea argues in this carefully researched… Continue reading Are Bad Trips a First World Problem? The Path to Centering the Indigenous Perspective in the “Psychedelic Renaissance”
Colliding Circles in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
Abul-Hawa’s “Colliding Circles in Everything Everywhere All at Once” connects the acclaimed Oscar Best Picture winner of 2022 to Jay… Continue reading Colliding Circles in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
Just ChatGPT it!
“Just chatGPT it!” has become a common joke in my friend group as of late. Long essay that you forgot about? Just chatGPT it! Free-response question on your quiz you forgot to study for? Just chatGPT it! Email due to your research coordinator that you may or may not have been putting off for a few weeks? Just chatGPT it!
I’m starting to hate this joke.
ChatGPT, Thinking Chamber or Thought Stopper?
Concerns come when people ask ChatGPT to write an entire essay/script/work, copy/paste that essay into their own document, and edit some parts to their liking. Within minutes they have “their own” essay. This is problematic because it’s plagiarism. And if you want to debate that you can’t plagiarize an AI, then it’s at least not a paper that you have written. It gets an assignment done earlier, but the student hasn’t learned anything, hasn’t really written anything. They lose the essential writing skills that will benefit them in the future.
Queer Life at Berkeley
Catherine Tong’s “Queer Life at Berkeley: Joy, Violence, and Resistance” is a powerful evaluation of UC Berkeley’s student-led queer culture, including ongoing challenges —relevant not just to Berkeley students but to queer studies more broadly — such as students feeling compelled to come out when they don’t want to. This is a selection from the essay, written for Prof. Seth Holmes’s Fall 2022 Art of Writing class, “Inequality and the Body: Health, Medicine, Society and Environment.”
Movement, Motivation & Medicine
Emma Lalor’s ambitious “Movement, Motivation & Medicine: an ethnographic look into pre-med experiences from immigrant students in California,” uses the medium of the graphic novel to create a powerful visual-verbal ethnography of challenges to immigrant students that often go unnoticed or unheard. Below are two chapters from the piece, which was written for Prof. Seth Holmes’s Fall 2022 Art of Writing class, “Inequality and the Body: Health, Medicine, Society and Environment.”