Hi! My name is Ananya Vaidya, and I’m a ’23 at Dartmouth College. I’m hoping to major in English, and maybe minor in something that I don’t quite know yet. I’m Indian by origin, but I was born and raised in the UAE.

To me, writing is a powerful tool that has many different uses. It’s a way that we communicate our thoughts and feelings with each other, tell a story and appeal to the emotions of our audience. My love for reading and writing go hand in hand; the books I love to read shape how I write. I think that reading helps develop empathy because it helps you see things from others’ perspectives, and I like using other peoples’ perspectives to inform my own writing. To me, an effective piece of writing is cohesive – it maintains its argument or core theme throughout its entirety. It should be well organised and flow well from point to point.

In order to talk about what I love about writing, I have to talk about why I want to major in English. Personally, I have always preferred writing essays to writing narratives. The reason for this is because I love analysing texts, finding connections between them in order to construct an argument. I enjoy finding out what a writer has to say about the human condition, or about the way we feel emotions, and doing so by breaking a text, a character or a theme to its core, and finding its connections to other works and the context of the author and the period in which it was written. What I enjoy most when reading someone else’s essay is being able to read their passion through their words.