Macy Hoeveler

My mom jokes that I started writing when I was 16 months old. I would take blank pieces of paper and trace horizontal lines like I was mimicking the words of a novel.

I wanted to be an author from the time I was in kindergarten to around seventh grade. For those seven years, the only thing I wanted to do was read and write. I wrote the first chapters to probably a hundred novels (each rip-offs of whatever book obsession I had that week) and not a single ending. It was the characters that I loved, creating the beginnings of worlds that would be destined to float around the family computer desktop folder titled “writing stuff.”

Going into high school, I changed directions. Years of frustrating English teachers and classes beat the love of language out of me, and I was forced to look for other places to settle.

The transition from humanities to STEM was less stark than I thought it was at the time. The books that urged me towards sciences were novels by Oliver Sacks and Andy Weir, texts that blended storytelling with scientific content, allowing me to begin exploring those interests while staying close to my comfort zone.

As I invested more into scientific writing and moved further away from literature and the arts, I avoided taking creative writing and language classes, sticking to as many science courses as possible. When I started at U of I, I hoped to never take a humanities course again.

However, the amount of academic papers required across my classes took me by surprise. I noticed that my experience with creative writing gave me an advantage in my science courses—I had developed a knack for writing research papers that didn’t feel stunted and boring. My knowledge of storytelling and creative exploration encouraged my writer’s voice to come through even in the most mundane of assignments. I began learning to balance the precise structure of research papers with linguistic complexity, flow, and scientific storytelling.

I wish I could say I was more comfortable tapping back into my creative side, but I’ve yet to come across an opportunity to explore narrative or fictional writing. However, I’ve grown immensely as an academic writer, editor, and teacher through my exploration of the intersection between the artistic and scientific writing disciplines.

Writing a good academic paper is, in essence, telling a story. Not only does it necessitate a clear and complex plot, but it blossoms with creative vocabulary and syntactic intricacies. In the Writers Workshop and as an editor for the Undergraduate Neuroscience Journal, I hope to bridge the divide between these purportedly incomparable—yet vastly interconnected—disciplines.

Emma Ortega

I can trace my love of writing back to hand-made pamphlets for my family about how to recycle and to implement recycling into our home. I would create books out of scrap paper, my first “books” being reasons why we had to take care of the earth: an inspiration I took from my kindergarten Earth Day trip. I believe Earth Day led to my love of the sciences, along with my first trip to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. I remember the feeling of learning so much that my first-grade heart nearly exploded, and, even to this day, I can remember every single exhibit in the museum (and even word-for-word repeat some of the presentations). That feeling of learning was connected to my initial love of science and young aspirations to do anything related to the scientific field when I was older.

Through middle school and the beginning of high school I recognized my love for writing, but simply regarded it as a hobby, placing my love for science at the forefront of my academic ambitions—until my sophomore year of high school, where my foreseen “career” in science abruptly ended in my 8 A.M. chemistry class. It had nothing to do with chemistry itself, but with the instructor who inevitably allowed me to realize my strong suits lie in the humanities.

I was always a kid who was reading. I showed off to my friends the new series I was reading, and during eighth grade, my teacher created a lunchtime “book club” made up of that teacher and one other student (me!). After sophomore year, I poured time into my English courses and other writing-based classes to ensure that when I went to college, I would be prepared for higher-level writing.

My decision to become an English major was a simple one. Despite the somewhat negative reputation of the major, I found it has allowed me to think critically outside of my own writing. Many of the skills I have learned from writing long-form essays come from major-specific courses I have taken over the years; however, where I have learned the most about myself as a writer is through the writers I have helped in the past three semesters working at the Writers Workshop.

Seeing the variety of students who walk through the writing center’s doors has allowed me to understand the importance of the writing process in combination with preserving a writer’s voice. College-level writing is difficult to navigate by oneself and even more difficult to navigate as one jumps in solo as a first-year student. What we as writing consultants attempt to do is make that navigation enjoyable while validating the students in their writing process. As an English major, I have always thought of the writing process as a process that is meant to allow the writer to convey their thoughts and ideas creatively and critically. As a Writers Workshop consultant, I encourage writers and myself to think creatively, critically, and freely when engaging in the writing process.

By Macy Hoeveler, Neuroscience major, Music minor, sophomore, & Emma Ortega, English major, Sociology minor, senior (Class of 2025)