Date of Award

5-2013

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Communication

Advisor/Committee Chair

Thomas Bass

Abstract

The first piece in my portfolio is a narrative article about the growing phenomenon of Quidditch. I did a lot of preliminary research about the evolution of the game—including how it was adapted from the pages of Harry Potter to an actual college sport. The Quidditch World Cup is an annual event in New York City and has received coverage from mainstream media outlets over the past few years. I have a close friend who plays the sport at Tufts University, which was what first drew me to the topic. I attended a tournament at Hofstra University and interviewed a number of students from various schools about how they first got involved, and why they love playing such a unique kind of game. It was a fascinating experience and one of the most rewarding investigative stories I’ve worked on. The next piece is a memoir assignment that details my life as a thirteen-year old becoming a Bar Mitzvah. I chose to focus on the actual singing the haftorah portion in front of my friends and family—something that I was initially quite nervous about doing. The assignment was initially difficult because I had to ease back into the emotional state of a 13 year old. However, I quickly found that there were plenty of interesting smaller stories to explore; including how our Rabbi at the time managed to offend a number of our friends and family. I find that the piece is about the weight of becoming a man and how even adults are fallible— which was a really important lesson for me to learn. The third piece is a response paper to the non-fiction report Female Chauvinist Pigs, by Ariel Levy. I wanted to incorporate Levy’s ideas about gender roles into an analytical discussion of my thoughts on the current state of television. I talk about the numerous intelligent, nuanced roles women have on television today, and how far we’ve come over the years (particularly even in the last decade with shows that now appear far less progressive than they did at first). Furthermore, the piece also delves into my personal feelings on how men have become stereotyped in pop culture as well, and what this means for modern masculinity. The fourth piece is a personal essay titled, “Weird! Boy.” I drew from personal experience; toward the end of my senior year in high school, I had discovered that a friend of mine had kept an online blog in which she wrote about me. It was important to me approach writing about this experience in a lighthearted fashion; though the subject matter was personal, I crafted the piece to be more comedic than some of the other pieces. The fifth piece in my portfolio was an entertainment news feature. I had long been interested in how movie trailers have become so different over the past 20 years or so. When E.T. was released, trailers evoked genuine suspense and intrigue from moviegoers; now, we roll our eyes and complain that we know how an entire movie will play out after seeing a three minute trailer. I interviewed a number of people asking if they were excited for the film, or if the lack of knowledge alienated them. Overall, I hope that the eclectic mix of works presented here reflect a wide range of writing ability, and the hard work and dedication it took in completing this project.

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