Welcome to my Narrative Medicine Portfolio. My name is Kimberly Strull and I have crafted this portfolio to display the work I’ve spent the semester creating.

Throughout the duration of this semester, so much has changed including my writing skills, perspective, emotions, and reading comprehension. I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Narrative Medicine, coming into such a unique class I truly didn’t know what to except. With a class that’s worth a whopping six credits, accounting for the topic section as well as the composition section, I wasn’t sure if I could handle the course load that I assumed would soon come. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that though the course would encompass a significant deal of work, it would also act as a true learning experience that I would take with me for the rest of my life. Even with a rigorous amount of work, I always found peace in coming to class every Monday and Wednesday. Having a professor that was understanding made the world of a difference in Narrative Medicine and Professor Ryder always knew when we needed a break. Our “Thanksgiving” breakfast before the physics midterm made all the difference in my day, had I not been enjoying food and good conversation I think I would’ve spent the morning stressing over problems and freaking myself out before I ever saw the exam. The class environment truly helped me develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes by allowing for unstructured classes such as eating and doing impromptu writing exercises we never saw on the syllabus. Aside from eating delicious food, there were many other classes that took significant stress off my back, especially the day we wrote the “It’s okay if” poems. Writing poems like this and pieces where we could pick any topic we desired, such as when I got to teach the class how to make a cappuccino, helped me grow as a writer while alleviating the stress of receiving a poor grade. I often found that I would write what I believed the teacher wanted in past English courses. However, these exercises allowed me to explore and analyze my own writing techniques, uncovering new genres and rhetorical situations. In the past four months, I’ve noticed an enormous amount of growth and development in not only my writing but also my comprehension and analysis of literary texts.

At the beginning of the semester, I struggled with sharing personal experiences which made writing my outsider narrative particularly difficult. Whenever I thought about being an outsider my mind immediately jumped to elementary school where I spent six years being harshly bullied. However, when I learned there would be peer edits on our paper I decided I should write about something else, since that wasn’t a part of me I was quite ready to share with my peers. This wound up being incredible for my writing, since it gave me my first ever opportunity to write about class. Being in a different class than most of my peers is something I spent most of my life experiencing and learned from a young age to never talk about. My outsider narrative taught me a lot as I relived my first job and wrote about it to the best of my ability. When I received my grade, I was sort of disappointed, yet I soon learned an important lesson for college writing, specificity is everything. Upon reviewing my comments on the Outsider Narrative, I realized how much I left out about race, the need for money, and the struggles I faced being forced to work at such a young age. This was truly helpful as I learned the importance of specificity as well as content in college writing.

The metaphor paper was different than any other paper I’ve written since it challenged me to include metaphors from two different pieces of work. After much planning, I was able to put together a paper that I felt truly captured the essence of both metaphors and I did my best to analyze them thoroughly keeping specificity in mind. In the Metaphor Paper, I stated,

“The word “car” represents the body, while “person” represents the soul or mind. Frank emphasizes the two parts through the use of metaphor to explain the control of one’s essence, the soul, has over his or her body and fate.” My analysis of the metaphor, “Body is a kind of car driven around by the person inside” really brings out the beginning of growth in my writing since for the first time, I use very specific wording and left nothing to the reader’s imagination where there could possibly be a miscommunication in my metaphor paper.

The Critical Lens paper was my personal favorite of the semester as I truly enjoyed finding a topic I liked and comparing it to a paper we analyzed in class. Though I did a complete 360 on the topic I had originally chosen in class, I couldn’t be happier with the way that my paper turned out. Getting to analyze the norms set up my lingerie companies was a challenging but rewarding task. I especially appreciated how my paper drew connections to the religious connotations behind Victoria Secret’s as stated, “The mere word itself is a mind game, angel, linked to religion it means to worship and it initiates the idea that one must worship the brand and its standard of beauty. Victoria Secret single-handedly linked themselves to being heavenly with the naming of their models alone.” Through the Critical Lens paper, I got to compose a text that integrated my stance with appropriate sources using critical analysis and interpretation of the religious meaning behind angel which required me to go outside of the typical retail sources that are used in the rest of the paper.

My final research paper is a fantastic way to sum up the semester especially since I chose to write about class. My first paper for this course, the outsider narrative, sparked an interest in writing about class which was something that hadn’t previously occurred to me. This spark stayed with me for the rest of the semester and is a new found subject that I feel I’ll research and write about for a long time. Prior to this course I never realize just how deep socioeconomic problems struck and how wide they spread. When I began writing about class I realized that it affects so many people, both globally and nationwide, and there is so much that needs to be done to correct the harsh cycle of poverty that exists today. Class is a topic I don’t think I’ll ever loose passion for. Through a thorough analysis of state funding and its outcomes in the reduction of teen pregnancy I was able to discover blatantly how states with less funding were at a severe disadvantage. I tried to incorporate a myriad of references in order to ensure that I was specific enough in my paper, taking what I learned from my outsider essay and correcting the mistakes that I made the first time I wrote about class helped me recognize my growth throughout this course.