About this Page

Hello everyone, my name is Madison Edwards and I am the owner of this website. Here, I will display all my work from this semester’s Narrative Medicine. I’ll introduce you to my works, my opinions, and my overall reflection on the work I have put in.

At the beginning of the semester, my classmates and I were tasked to write a Narrative “Outsider” essay where we chose a point in time in our lives when we felt different in the communities we were in. The second task was the Metaphor essay that had us incorporate a Narrative Medicine source and a source of our choosing to explain how illnesses may or may not be stigmatized. The third task was the Critical Lens essay where once again we had to use an NM source but narrow down a topic in the “eyes” of a specific group of people. Finally, we had to complete a research project that not only had us continue to use an NM source, but we had to propose a question or inquiry and find sources to answer the said inquiry. 

At the beginning of the course, I was an amateur at citing and writing. I recognized that my citations, as pointed out by Professor Geoghan, were formatted incorrectly and out of alphabetical order which you can see in the Metaphor and Critical Lens first drafts. However, I later learned how to do it correctly and my Research paper reflects the correct version of MLA formatting. In addition to that, some of my headers are underlined because I didn’t know that it wasn’t supposed to be, as well as the names of works being quoted when they should be italicized. Once again, the formatting improves. As for my writing, I have realized that I wasn’t really explaining much and using my quotes to explain for me. I spent less time analyzing and more time looking for quotes to defend my position so my writing was sloppy. This is mostly the problem in the Metaphor essay but becomes resolved in the Critical Lens and Research paper. An example from the Metaphor Essay:

“The trait mostly reflects the illness of obsessive-compulsive disorder  (OCD), as patients with this condition often experience “uncontrollable, reoccurring thoughts (“obsessions”) and/or behaviors (“compulsions”) that he or she feels the urge to repeat over and over” (National Institute of Mental Health)”.

 The reason for this problem is the fact that I have lost a passion for writing, especially essays because the structure is too mechanic and leaves little room for expressing oneself. Near the end of the semester, I warmed up to writing again because of the freedom given in Narrative Medicine. In addition, my quoting became better as well. I learned how to put in parentheses to make sure my quotes are grammatically correct. An example from my Critical Lens:

“[Eugenics is] echoing Dr. Frankenstein’s fear that his monster might mate and produce a race of monsters, emphasiz[ing] the terror with which the “normal” beholds the differently abled”(Davis 15).

My favorite works were everything but the Critical Lens. When I had come up with the topics in mind for the Critical Lens, I went too narrow which left little room for any work to come up with. I ended up having to change my plan of action and put out an essay that was not the best, especially since I wasn’t the most passionate about the topic. 

However, I really liked my Narrative, Metaphor, and Research papers because I put a large amount of passion into the inquiries and the topics of all of them were narrow but not so much to the point where it was hard to find works to create a stance. They are also the essays that I felt as though I learned the most from. My metaphor essay made me confront the reality that mental illnesses are thought of as jokes, making people take those suffering less seriously. In addition to that, my Research paper brought to light how the stigma of menstruation leads women to be silent because they do not want to be judged and harassed. With my Narrative essay, I felt as though I was able to tell a story about myself without being gaslighted and ignored, which was very relieving.

That is all for my Introduction, please make your way through my portfolio to reflect on my growth as a student in Narrative Medicine throughout this semester.