Writing to Win
by Sylvia Perez
Sylvia Perez won last years Distinguished Speakers Essay Contest. In the essay below Perez describers her process for writing the essay that won her the oppurtunity to have dinner with the award-winning journalist & author Laura Ling.
On the night of September 19, 2014 I sat down at my dining room table and stared at a prompt for an essay contest. The winner would personally meet and have dinner with journalist and author Laura Ling. This was the prompt:
Laura Ling’s book “Somewhere Inside” focuses on Laura’s 140-day captivity in North Korea and Lisa’s fight to bring her sister home. How involved do you feel the United States should be in foreign affairs and at what point do we increase or limit our participation?
The first thing I did was rewrite the prompt on a scrap sheet of paper and drew a thick line in the middle of the last sentence of the prompt, separating the question into two questions. The first: How involved do I feel the US should be in foreign affairs? That was a sticky question, in my opinion. I mean, have you watched the news regarding foreign affairs? There’s all this criticism being shot toward the US for getting involved or for not getting involved. The media has the biggest part in creating “factual” sources for people that stand in different countries and speak in different languages. That media, always putting the US on the spotlight. Then, after thinking all of this, I realized I already had an opinion formed on how the general population forms opinions. I have formed my opinions by watching television, reading articles, and really paying attention in my history and philosophy classes. History repeats itself. People are, in general, typical. However, my opinion on how involved I feel the US should be in foreign affairs was mostly influenced by Mr. Fred Rogers, from “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” He once said, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers—so many caring people in this world.”
I totally agree and so the very first sentence of my essay was, I think of the United States of America as the “good Samaritan” of the world. I went on to explain my reasoning behind that very first statement, taking into consideration what I have observed from observing both the media at work and how we as people react to what the media produces. At the end of the day, people from all of the world have had their opinions influenced by the news, including world leaders. I was motivated and wrote: They hate us. They love us. If we decide to act, people question why we acted. If we decided not to act, people question our ethics. Our efforts are televised. Our televised efforts affect our reputation as a nation.
The second question, the one on the other side of the thick line I drew, was: At what point do we—the US of A—increase or limit our participation? In order to link both questions with a single answer I decided to briefly explain the decision-making process when it comes to dealing with foreign affairs. I knew that there were multiple agencies at work, so I went on Google and did a quick search on “foreign policy,” “Interpol” and “What the hell does the U.N. do anyway?” I found and read information from credible sources, such as legit government websites (instead of whacko-and-quack-prone Wikipedia).Just a few minutes of searching and reading gave me a general understanding of the decision-making
process and I incorporated it with my thoughts on media influence. People don’t see the decision-making process on television, they only see the effects and they only hear opinions, opinions, opinions. The media likes to report on what goes on behind the scenes, but rarely do they let on that the government actually knows what it’s doing.That was my answer for that “stopping point” the question referred to. It takes the know-how of different people, from different agencies and offices to form the grandest opinions out there that are affecting our world and our reality. There is no definite knowing of when to limit our participation. It’s all guesswork—educated guesses from the people we put in charge to protect us and the educated guesses of the people they rely on for information.
By using our own opinions, as students, formed from what we have already learned in school and in life, doing a bit of research on what we don’t fully understand, and finding a way to incorporate both can lead to a 496-word essay that win a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I got to meet Laura Ling, listen to her advice to the aspiring journalists that sat around us in the university’s ballroom, and learned that she really liked the chef’s twist on crème-brûlée.
Sylvia Perez is a nursing student at UTPA. She is also a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, who's books To Save the Humans, The Record Keeper's Wife, Salphos: Prince of Delnot, and Adalin Meddling with Time can be found on lulu.com, barnesandnoble.com and amazon.com.
