Welcome!

 Welcome! Come on in. Make yourself comfortable; there’s plenty of space here to stretch out and get comfy. My name’s Colson Combs, and I’m excited to share my writing and work from LANG 120.013 with you! I’m a first year student at UNC Asheville majoring in Music Technology. I’ve worked long and hard to have these pieces and I hope that you enjoy them!

Over the semester, among other projects, I’ve created four pieces of communication designed to build my skill as a writer and thinker in several different areas. 

First, I worked with my classmate and fellow Music Technology major Giuliana Chiquito to craft an informative infographic detailing how writing is used in the music industry. In the process of creating this infographic, we interviewed our music theory instructor Dr. Andy Jurik about how he uses writing in his work and did online research to cultivate our points. We used Canva to design the infographic and Giuliana made quite a few inspired design choices!

I also created a Personal Narrative essay centered on my relationship with nature over the last several years. I chose the “Origin Story” subtopic, but really my essay could be seen as either an Origin Story or Nature Narrative, depending on the perspective of the reader. This was one of the best writing processes I’ve experienced - my words came easily and naturally and I was able to paint pictures and outline images that I really liked throughout the work. In writing this piece I also got greater clarity on thoughts of mine that had been in a jumble before I put them down on paper. In the end, I told a story that felt honest and true.

My third major project this semester was the creation of an annotated bibliography. This project was new to me, and it forced me to confront my fear of creating works cited pages and MLA style citations. I had a lot of trouble deciding what problem I wanted to tackle with the bibliography, so I visited the Writing Center to get some help narrowing down my ideas. I knew that I wanted to write about the state of happiness, but I wasn’t sure how to narrow the topic down and make it suitable for a five source bibliography and paper. The Writing Center was immensely helpful, and the person that I talked to helped me decide to write about happiness in the United States in relation to other countries. 

Last, and as a continuation of the process begun with my annotated bibliography, I wrote a paper discussing why Americans might be less happy than people from other countries and how individuals can find greater happiness on a day-to-day basis. This part of the project took me a long time to draft but was very rewarding to research and develop. During the pandemic and in my time at university, happiness and its causes have become a great focus for me. I have been thinking a lot about how to find happiness and what it means to be happy, and it was great to be able to put all of that thought and energy into this assignment.

Again, I hope that you enjoy my words and work because I have enjoyed bringing them into the world! Happy days.

Colson Combs