Ghostwriting Reflection

While some people may have found difficulty in writing about a topic outside of their realm of expertise, my difficulties with this assignment were more closely linked to writing style and voice. As the individual I ghostwrote for has a very different writing style from my own, I had to rewrite parts of this paper several times in order to make it fitting with my subject's own voice. I guess I never really thought much about my own writing style before now, but this assignment forced me to do just that. I now realize that in my own writing, I tend to utilize the passive voice more than the average writer and my sentences are on the longer side, frequently broken up with parenthesis and semicolons. In addition, my incorporation of sentence splices is another attribute that may distinguish my writing from other people’s. Perhaps some of these differences can be attributed to our different academic focuses. Since I am a Comm Arts major here, I am very familiar with writing papers for Comm Arts classes, while my subject is more used to writing a different style of papers in her education classes. For this reason, our personal styles are noticeably different. In total, these factors came into play during my ghostwriting. After completing my first draft, my subject read over it and voiced concern that the style did not really match her own. We then had to sit down together and revise some of these troubled areas in order to make the paper more applicable to her own personal style. I’m not quite sure how this turned out, but I think that we at least made some progress. Overall, this assignment was helpful to me as it not only allowed me the opportunity to try ghostwriting but also gave me insight to my own writing style and how it differs from that of my peers.

And as a quick comment on the ethics of ghostwriting in relation to my experience here: I didn't have too much of an ethical problem with ghostwriting before completing this assignment, and still do not. I think that this was much more of a challange to complete than I initially thought and do not think I will being a great deal of ghostwriting in the future...unless I am paid enough money to offset the hardship, that is.