Practice Whole Brain

     Jacqui McPeck      

         Unfortunately, many of the assignments I’ve completed thus far have had pretty unforgiving guidelines that didn’t leave much room for right-brained thinking. The one project that really could have benefited from a more whole-brained response was the “Maker’s Project” in my writing course. In it, we could either pick a pre-existing museum, memorial, or work of art that had historic significance and write several paragraphs describing how specific aspects of the piece highlighted elements of rhetoric and manipulated the piece’s impact, or we could design our own memorial or artwork and explain our own intended purpose. For the sake of time, I chose to examine Edgar S. Paxson’s Custer’s Last Stand despite my initial excitement at the opportunity to create something more artistic. While I was happy with my finished project and the high marks I received, I still can’t shake the feeling that I should have taken the other option and set my right brain free. I would have loved to draw out my own memorial complete with well-thought-out landscaping and hidden meanings or even pull out my well-worn paint set and used a symphony of colors to convey emotion and importance. In the end, I chose to follow the relative safety of a run-of-the-mill paper instead of taking the risk and using the whole-brained approach to this project. In the future, I hope to challenge myself to tackle the more engaging project options, like designing my own memorial, head-on and use the inevitable time crunch to motivate myself instead of being intimidated back into a strictly left-brained or right-brained approach.