During Lehman’s Spring 2019 semester, Professor Dhipinder Walia (otherwise known as the Notorious DW), had her English 121 class write a series of blog posts. These blog posts had two primary functions: to expose her students to different styles of writing, and teach them how to apply those writing styles to their own works. Michael Sutherland was one of these students:

“I really tried to cover a lot of different subjects into my blog posts, in order to expand my view of my project. Maybe that’s why I changed topics twice, and almost changed it a third time!” Sutherland said, laughing. “Applying different views of radicalism and pragmatism, combined with my own life experiences (watching West Wing), helped me shape my work into the product it is today.”

Sutherland emphasized the importance of learning to write in different styles, and applying those styles in creative ways. “Applying math and statistics is difficult in an personal essay about West Wing, but just considering doing it changed my view of the paper. So, it’s not so much the techniques that connect the points, but rather the execution of those techniques which shifts the student’s view.”

When asked what he wanted the reader to gain from reading the posts, Sutherland laughed, saying, “I don’t know! I kind of ramble a lot, and talk about nothing in a lot of cases. At the very least, I hope they learn a little bit about American history!”

Author’s note: I don’t know why I wrote this in the form of a newspaper article. 

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.