Third culture kid friendships. Funeral traditions. Gen Z and the workplace. These topics and more are included in this second volume of long-form essays produced in the Communication Leadership Winter 2024 course Professional Long-form Writing & Platforms.
As I laid out this issue of Mind Shift, a striking feature was the number of essays that began with the word “I,” evidence that in the words of writer Valeria Luiselli, these graduate students were writing themselves “into the world.”
One of the paradoxes of first-person writing is that the more specific you are to documenting your own lived experiences, the greater the chance that readers will identify with what they absorb off the page. The universal experience is revealed through individual stories.
Anita Verna Crofts
Comm Lead Artist in Residence
Mind Shift 2024 by COMMLD540
University of Washington
Department of Communication