Hi everyone! My name is Olivia Ralston, and my pronouns are she/her. I am a senior who is double majoring in Psychology and Chemistry. I am originally from Dayton, Ohio, and I have two younger siblings. I love cats and spend way too much time on the internet watching YouTube and other types of content.
My relationship with reading and writing has always significantly differed from other subjects. You can be objectively good at math, while reading and writing tend to be more subjective. Reading has always been my strong suit and a passion of mine. Growing up, other kids’ parents would ground them by taking away electronics, and my parents took away reading. This horrified my teachers, but my parents claim it was the only thing that worked. I almost always had a book in my hand throughout middle school; I even once got a referral for reading in my 8th grade Social Studies class. My relationship with writing has always been… less solid. Throughout school, I struggled to put my thoughts down on paper, and was never happy with the results. Any writing assignment I gave my mom to proofread came back in a sea of red ink. I believe there are two reasons for this. One reason is that I tend to write as I think, and my writing simply cannot capture everything I want to say. The other reason is that I simply do not find the same joy in writing that I found in reading.
Hey Olivia — thank you for your post! I’m excited to have you in the class! I love that you have such a passion for reading (it will definitely come in handy in this class!). I think reading and writing are closely related, and sometimes it helps me to reframe writing as “reading what’s out there” instead of needing to write something entirely new or original. Additionally, I will try to emphasize in class that a strategy that has made a massive difference for me in writing is to separate the writing and editing processes. Too often we edit while we write, which can disrupt our flow, cause us to censor ourselves, and limit what we might discover through writing that we hadn’t intentionally planned on thinking about. I highly recommend free-writing as a tactic also! Getting every word in your head on paper with no concern for how it sounds or how correct it looks can help us figure out what we’re trying to say sometimes better than if we force ourselves to “come up” with that discovery without the process. Looking forward to the semester!