I will be taking a short academic essay that I wrote in English 125 and experimenting with erasure. The essay discusses and analyzes the characters on the Showtime network’s Shameless in their depictions of mental illness, and talks about their accuracy in comparison to other television shows and movies. Out of the three essays that I wrote for that class, I got the worst grade on this one, which was disappointing at the time. I felt so strongly about the topic of that essay, and it was frustrating and discouraging to see something that I was passionate about not get the grade that I thought it deserved.

              I would love to see where this essay goes without the constraints of the English 125 grading rubric. I have a lot of things to say about it, and with the erasure technique, I will be able to say things that I might have left unsaid in the draft that I handed in two years ago. I think there's a lot of power in doing that. I will be taking my essay as is, or maybe the strongest paragraphs of the essay, and blacking out most of the words on the page, save for a few words that, when read, will create a new story. By doing this, I hope to create a prose poem that holds is powerful and more meaningful than the original version.