Ima Student

English and Digital Media | Writing Samples

Introduction

The two projects below are the core of my application. I wrote them a semester apart and didn't plan for them to talk to each other. Assembling this portfolio, I found one question running through both of them. What happens to a reader's agency when a digital text is designed to anticipate that reader?

The seminar paper approaches the question critically, through the rhetoric of AI personas. The interactive story approaches it as a maker. I built choices for a reader, then watched playtesters show me those choices meant nothing. Each sample is followed by a short account of how it developed, because the revisions are where my thinking actually changed. I see my graduate work beginning where these two projects meet.

Designed to Be Believed: AI Personas as Rhetorical Interfaces

Writing Sample 1 | Seminar Paper in Digital Rhetoric | Fall 2025 | 5,800 words, with companion video essay

This paper argues that the personas of conversational AI systems are not accidental byproducts of the technology. They are designed rhetorical interfaces that hide computation behind a familiar social surface and invite users to extend the kind of trust they'd give a person.

Drawing on Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass's research on the "media equation" and Lucy Suchman's work on human-machine interaction, I read the public self-presentation of two commercial AI assistants as a constructed ethos. I argue that critical AI literacy has to start by treating the persona as a text that can be read, with an author and an intended audience.

Research process and revision

My first draft framed AI personas as deception, a friendly mask over a machine. My instructor pushed back on that binary. It assumed there was some honest, persona-free interface underneath, and there isn't. That objection reorganized the project. I spent the next month reading in human-computer interaction instead of media criticism, and the revised paper treats the persona as a designed experience with real effects rather than as a lie. The paper's conclusion about critical awareness grew directly out of that shift.

I also tested the argument in another medium. The companion video essay is delivered by an AI-generated presenter built from a synthetic face and a synthetic voice. Producing it made the paper's claims concrete for me. Every decision about the presenter's tone and expression was a design choice aimed at the viewer's trust.

Why this is my primary writing sample

This is the project I most want to keep working on. It shows how I enter a scholarly conversation, and it also shows how I change my position when a better objection comes along. I presented an early version at an undergraduate research symposium in Spring 2026.

  • Digital Rhetoric
  • Critical AI Studies
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Multimodal Composition
Watch the Video Essay Read the Paper (PDF)

What the Marsh Keeps: An Interactive Southern Gothic Story

Writing Sample 2 | Visual Novel with Critical Rationale | Spring 2026 | Built in Ren'Py

What the Marsh Keeps is a short visual novel set in a coastal Georgia town, where one family's history keeps resurfacing in the tidal marsh. It adapts the conventions of Southern Gothic fiction to a branching form. The question behind it is what happens to the genre's sense of an inescapable past when the reader gets to make choices.

The project demonstrates command of the visual novel as a genre, including its pacing and the design of its choice points. The accompanying 2,500-word critical rationale situates the project in interactive fiction scholarship, especially Janet Murray's account of agency in Hamlet on the Holodeck, and explains how the branching structure carries the story's themes.

Design process and revision

Playtesting broke my first version. I had written eleven branches, and testers told me the choices felt cosmetic, because every path reached the same ending with slightly different dialogue. I cut the story down to three real decision points and made each one cost the reader something they couldn't get back.

That revision is also where the project's argument came from. Southern Gothic insists the past can't be escaped, and I realized the form could make the reader feel that limit instead of just reading about it. The critical rationale went through three drafts as I worked out how to say that in the vocabulary of game studies.

Why it belongs in a graduate application

This piece connects my training in literary history to my interest in digital media. It also shows I can do creative-critical work, making an argument through the design of a text as well as about one. That's the kind of practice-based research I'd like to pursue at the graduate level.

  • Interactive Fiction
  • Narrative Design
  • Genre Adaptation
  • Creative-Critical Practice
Read the Critical Rationale (PDF) Play the Story

Earlier work, including a published essay on contemporary Southern Gothic fiction, is listed on my CV.