This article was created for History 580 Nonfiction Writing during the Fall 2021 semester. where each week we worked on creating a nonfiction narrative of our choosing. I decided this was a great opportunity to learn more about my lifelong home in Seattle, so I wrote about one of the city’s most important events, “The Battle for Seattle”. This multi-day spectacle witnessed a clash between peaceful protestors and riot police, marking an important day in the war against globalization.
This piece demonstrates my growth as a writer and scholar as nonfiction was still a genre I was less unfamiliar with. By blending a narrative with facts and utilizing my own experience as a Seattleite, I created a work that paid tribute to a historic moment in US history.
The area where the assignment needs the most work is clearly the grammar and rhetoric, which constantly switches between past and present tense. Also, I have a running theme of jokes that reference famous movies and tv shows set in Washington which, although amusing, are a bit corny and forced. Finally, Dr. Barber pointed out that I should consider leaning more toward the piece’s targetted audience, teenagers, which admittedly I had completely forgotten about while writing.
This paper has been important for my own intellectual growth. Despite the titular event taking place more than twenty years ago, it did push me to learn more about current events as I have traditionally been more interested in older historical case studies. Also, despite being proud of the work and having learned a lot about both nonfiction writing and my hometown, working on this paper made me realize the type of writing I am not interested in.
Matthew Kajiwara-Hernandez 