Writing, it's official

As part of my graduate degree in Urban Planning, I've enrolled in a writing class called Effective Writing for Public Communication. To date I haven't been a very good public communicator by means of writing, since no one reads this blog that I write on urban planning. I don't advertise my blog and I haven't published any of my urban planning work with exception of posting papers on obscure URLs that no one will ever find. This isn't from lack of self-confidence. I simply don't have a large enough body of work to justify putting together a fancy web page to host it. Thus I have limited most of my outreach to this semi-private blog. As I dig into my first summer and soon second year of graduate school, I will amass several research projects, many design ideas of public space improvements, and hopefully a comprehensive plan or two about important places where I dwell. It is therefore inevitable that I combine my blog writing and all the projects I do into some online form that is destined for public consumption. The writing class will help me present my work with good language, making persuasive and well-reasoned explanations about my work, which primarily advocates car-free neighborhood redevelopment and superb transit to serve neighborhoods and cities. In addition to publishing my work online, the course will also help me become more connected in the planning community, media, and government, by encouraging me to become active with editorials, comments, and submission of my urban plans to those who will listen. Thus there is the online portfolio and the aggressive solicitation of ideas that together represent my written output.

I have never struggled greatly to write, but that may be the result of mediocre standards. My vocabulary, word usage, and sentence structure are deficient by my own evaluation because I enjoy the study of the English language and foreign languages, but don't consider myself to be well-read nor greatly practiced at writing. I think the course will give me the needed trainer that forces me to do the exercises that I want to be doing on my own. Already since beginning the course last week I have been writing in my blogs more frequently to complete a 4-7 times-per-week journal requirement. Interestingly, I have mostly been writing in my blog about learning German, rather than writing in my urban planning or personal blogs. I don't at this time know what I'm going to get out of the class. I expect to absorb many good writing exercises and techniques that I keep in mind as I write in the future. I find that in most new activities in which I partake, I am keen to what learning tools emerge to help me with that subject. I expect I'll latch on to several tools that help me increase my vocabulary while decreasing verbosity. I'll also learn to observe my writing as an outsider, reviewing drafts frequently to be able to make more objective evaluations of my writing's usefulness to myself and others.

I need to at this point come up with three options for final writing projects for the course. The first that comes to mind relates my project to make the Tufts campus car-free as well as College Avenue between Davis Square and the anticipated Green Line station at Tufts. Pedestrianization of these student-heavy corridors would be aided by a modern streetcar that would traverse College Avenue and a critical street of Tufts, such as Professor's Row. Therefore my writing project would be an initial letter to the president of Tufts, the mayors of Somerville and Medford, or to all three. I call this project Car-free Tufts. A second possible writing project is an editorial that describes to the public why the Urban Ring needs to be built now and why it is both advantageous and necessary from an economic perspective. The Urban Ring is the decades old idea to connect the inner suburbs and neighborhoods of Boston by a circular rail line that extends through Chelsey, Medford, Roxbury, and East Boston. My final idea is a loud call to arms for pedestrians and bikers to rise up and protest the spatial and environmental injustice that they suffer from the automobile. I will write an editorial or magazine article describing what tools pedestrians and bikers have for taking the streets away from cars, such as public displays of protest, pressure on elected officials, and legal action that opposes car usage from an environmental and health perspective. I call this project Car-free Movement.

I like all of these ideas equally, and having just thought of them I do not yet have a favorite. I have a lot of knowledge about each subject already researched, except for the third option. I expect I will have to do a large amount of research for each--finding economic justifications for the first two and figuring out how to frame the arguments for all three. The benefits of the Car-free Tufts and Urban Ring projects is that they will help me develop my ideas for getting either one implemented. The benefits of the Car-free Movement project is that it will help me develop ideas about how I want to make the car-free movement a visible policy issue, which it certainly isn't right now. The length of the Car-free Tufts and Car-free Movement writings would likely be around eight to ten pages, since each will have to go into a fair amount of detail. The Urban Ring writing, being an editorial, would be limited to a couple pages.