We Missed

Dissecting a genre forces you to look at the aspects that make a style characteristically

itself. When attempting to translate genres, information, organization, and other conventions

must be adjusted for the new style and audience. By doing so, overlooked aspects of the old

piece are revealed creating new meanings. Moreover, translation can pose challenges, but a focus

on the characteristics and goal of the work help keep it on track. For the second writing project, I

translated an online newspaper article to a poem by deciding to: write in a short, concise style

that rhymed, leave only pertinent information and rely on interpretation, change the point of

view, and include names for the characters.

A critical decision for writing project two was to determine the genre the primary source

was to be translated into. I decided to write a poem since this project was all about creativity, and

poetry gives the author complete artistic control while allowing for a large audience. Poetry is a

broad genre that grants structural, organizational, and thematic freedom, thus, the genre supports

authentic expression of complex emotions and themes by erasing common literary limitations.

Furthermore, the interpretation of the poem - be that intended by the poet or constructed by the

readers - permits for many meanings to be derived from the same piece of work. As a result,

people find personal connections and applications to their own lives. Due to these aspects, I

determined that a poem would provide me countless options as a writer and compel me to

improve my literary decision making.

Next, I decided the genre of my primary source and its theme. I started by looking up the

most popular online newspaper articles, under the assumption there was a reason for their

popularity, and found the article “Top Five Regrets of the Dying.” The article addresses the

dissatisfaction with life choices, which is often avoided because it includes ideas that individuals
are reluctant to accept. Due to the censoring of the concepts by focusing on quotes and facts,

there are untapped emotions that the author avoids, which I believe hid the true message of the

theme. It was an inspiring article, but it was just in the wrong genre to genuinely express the

ideas and gain readership by a larger audience.

While the newspaper article was written for middle-aged adults, when writing I made

decisions, such as a length and word choice, that were aimed towards my new audience of young

adults. These two audiences look for very different things in written pieces of work: young adults

look for realism that makes them feel understood, and middle-aged adults look for entertainment

and escape from their daily lives. For that reason, the age groups might interpret the pieces

differently. However, the interpretive quality of a poem makes it accessible to all ages since it

holds truths that are universal.

As aforementioned, poems can have a wide range of structures and organizations,

therefore it was a challenge to choose which would support the theme best. I considered what

would best appease my audience to help narrow the options; short lines and small stanzas allow

an ease of reading for an audience who has a short attention span. Further, I reduced the amount

of descriptive words from the original and instead I relied on the ideas to illustrate the scenes.

For instance, “Stopped being quiet and learned to fight it / So great things were not left in

storage” explains an ambiguous scene of a girl not speaking up for what she wanted and thus not

reaching her full potential. Although the scene is vague, the reader can imagine the whole scene

from the framework presented. In general, these choices contribute to a concentration on the

thesis of the poem rather than secondary details.

Furthermore, I decided to make most of the stanzas have a rhyme pattern. For example,

“Ernest wished he had lived true/ Tuned out the voices, made the choices, / And completed the
dreams he wanted to do” where the first and last lines have end rhyme and the middle has an

internal rhyme. This style of rhyme creates a flow within the stanzas that pulls the reader through

the lines. Likewise, the rhyme causes the lines to stick in the reader’s head leading to later

reflection of the ideas. However, this approach posed a challenge because the lines could feel

forced or incongruent- produced by need for a rhyme. Thankfully, revisions fixed these problems

so rather than stumbling over lines, a fluidity was achieved.

Then I had to decide the elements of the article that I would keep or leave out of the

poem. The design behind what to include came from the handout “Revision Strategies” which

states, “ADD: …context, a story, characters, adjectives…DELETE: details that distract or

confuse the reader…tangents that are neither pivotal nor essential to your purpose…”

(Browning, 1) This encouraged the most pivotal information to be saved while inferior details be

removed for clarity. First I kept the leading ideas for my stanzas from the section titles, which

were bolded in the newspaper article. Secondly, I condensed the article’s introduction in this

way, “In the dark days of the white hallways/ Today I asked their biggest regrets” which kept the

setting and the theme the same. Lastly, many details- the quotes from the book- had to be left out

due to the structure I chose. To protect the message, I was careful to create images about the

interviewees’, the elderly people, lives where interpretation could fill in the details that were

missing. This was sometimes challenging because I had to choose the part of the interviewee’s

story that would convey the most meaning forcing a balancing act of correctness and

comprehension. Although much of the article is not expressly reflected in the poem, the

translation’s focus was to keep the underlying message.

For comprehension, I changed the point of view from the reporter to the author of the

book. Trying to represent a tertiary source point of view in a poem would be very difficult and
unnecessarily confusing. With the author as the voice in the poem the reader can experience the

interviewees through her eyes. In addition, it allowed for a dialogue to be formed between the

speaker and the reader at the end of the poem, “And I pray you will say” forcing the reader to

think about the ideas in accordance to themselves.

The most noticeable change I made to the information from the article was constructing

names for the elderly people that were interviewed. On the surface, the names make the poem

personal and relatable, but going further the names remind the reader that the stories are from

real people. I choose each of the names with intention, and each has a connection to the regret

they are representing. Ernest for example, who “wished he had lived true” sounds like earnest

meaning “showing depth and sincerity of feeling.” By connecting these ideas the connotation of

“true” is expanded. Other interviewees were named after pop culture characters who they are the

most unlike or associated with common sayings.

The last big challenge was to decide the moment portrayed in the poem. The function of

an article versus a poem is very different, therefore what they convey can be disparate. I decided

to make my moment based off the last idea the reporter states in her article, “what's your greatest

regret so far, and what will you set out to achieve or change before you die?” (Steiner) In this

way, the poem’s message is a warning of all the things that you could end up regretting when

you do not experience life to the fullest. To make this idea even more impactful I repeated the

line “In the dark days of the white hallways” in a stanza with a broken rhyme which resetting the

reader back to the moment like a conclusion in an essay.

Throughout this whole process I went through the steps that Dirk outlines in her paper

“Navigating Genres.” Since this writing project was more about writing appropriately rather than

writing excellence, the dissection of the genres themselves was of the highest importance. As
Dirk explains that it is all about, “recognizing the rhetorical situation of your action and choosing

to act in a manner that would result in the outcome you desired” (Dirk, 253) Therefore the

biggest take away of the project was to remember to identify the goals and audience of the piece,

and accommodate to those aspects, and let those limitations guide the piece.
 Works Cited

Browning, Randi. “Revision Strategies.”

“Navigating Genres.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, by Kerry Dirk, vol. 1, Parlor Press,

2010, pp. 249–262.

Steiner, Susie. “Top Five Regrets of the Dying.” The Guardian , Guardian News and Media, 1

Feb. 2012, 06:49, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-

the-dying.