Building A Writing Portfolio From Scratch.
At the end of a 4-year undergraduate degree, when one goes from the honourable status ‘student’ to the less honourable status of ‘unemployed’, it’s common to wonder what you got out of your degree.
I gained many great experiences from taking a B.Sc. in Psychology at U of T. I met wonderful friends, teammates, coaches, professors, teaching assistants, and graduate students. I took really cool classes, and joined a few clubs. But the one thing I don’t feel like I got out of my time at university was a good portfolio of written work to boast about.
Don’t get me wrong, I have written plenty of essays, reports, proposals, and presentations. But they all focussed on very niche psychology research, riddled with jargon. These essays aren’t exactly easy reading, or necessarily easy to understand outside of the field of psychology.
While writing these sorts of essays has prepared me for graduate school (which I plan on eventually pursuing), it has always been important to me to write engaging writing pieces that flow well and are accessible to a broad audience. I’d also like to pursue a career in writing in some shape or form.
So here I am. Attempting to make a writing portfolio from scratch. I’ve been brainstorming ways to make it seem less daunting.
Here are a few general tips for starting a writing portfolio:
They say you should write about what you know. After 4 years of specializing in one thing, the one thing that I know a ton about is psychology. Whether or not you enjoyed your major, what did you take away from it?
You might already have some semi-completed work right under your nose. I suggest that you go through some past school essays to transform them from dry academic essays to creative non-fiction. I certainly have some old psychology essays lying around with the potential to be creative fodder.
If you’re unsure of what to write about, it’s good to start with your goals. Figure out what your personal goals are, and then research and write about subjects that pertain to them. I plan on also writing some new work that pertains to what I want to eventually research in graduate school. Writing about psychology topics will help me hone in on what I might want to research for 1–2 years.
Make time to write. This one is obvious, but often the hardest. When you’re job hunting, or working full-time, it’s not always easy to make time. Personally, I sometimes feel guilty about writing, because I feel like I could be sending out another job application. Give yourself at least an hour per day. That’s 7 hours in a 168 hour week. That’s only 4.2% of your week. Sure, maybe you’ll get too busy on one day, but make up for that time later.
Ask someone to edit or critique your work. If you ask someone if they can take a look over your work next week, you have a firm deadline for finishing a draft. Not only will you complete work sooner, you’ll also have a spelling/grammar checker, and a test audience for your work. We all feel shy about sharing our work sometimes, but the benefits definitely out weigh the cons.
Don’t throw away a draft because it sounds silly or stupid. Why does it sound silly? Sometimes we give up too soon. Most avid writers have countless drafts. Figure out what’s good about what you’ve written. Even if you can’t find anything good about what you wrote, figure out what exactly went wrong before you discard a draft for good. What did you neglect to think of when writing it? How can you incorporate that into future work?
Focus on quality over quantity. We would all like to have a huge stack of articles or stories to flaunt in our portfolio. But if you’re starting from scratch, you have very few pieces to show off the merits of your writing style. It’s better to work hard on a few pieces to identify your voice than to write several poorly thought-out pieces that don’t exemplify your full writing potential.
