Zach Brown
ERH-101-05
Ms. Smith
12/4/2019
Word Count: 1559 Help Received: Ms. Smith and Rory Groat-Revision
Me, Myself, and Write
Writing has always been a difficult task for me. I have never been able to put my finger on what my problem with it is. It could be the long amounts of time sitting trying to stay focused or the pressure applied by teachers to write “the perfect paper.” Throughout this class, however, I have learned that writing is not about what others think but is instead just your everyday thoughts printed onto a piece of paper in Lexmark ink to show others what you truly want to say. This is where my view on writing changed. Writing when I was younger was one on my list of “never want to do,” but now I actually find it somewhat relieving to just put all of my ideas into something that others can understand. The writing process for me is not conventional, but it works for me, which is all that matters. I am a person that has used writing to express what I often struggle to say in person.
As a kid I always dreaded going to my English class. The long boring class about a subject that, even as a child, I felt as though I should have understood since it was my primary language. However, I learned quickly that I had no clue what English was, and as I’ve learned throughout this class, neither do many professional writers. Writing is a difficult subject to teach, grade, and perform. The various styles make it hard to choose what is good and what is not so much. When I was younger I could never understand what I was doing wrong compared to the other kids in my class when it came to writing papers. This is why from a young age I strayed away and tried to avoid writing as much as I could. Unlike math, history, or science classes where there is one answer, in writing there are unlimited amounts of answers. This did not make sense to me as a kid as we learned that a question usually had one answer, but as I grew older I believe this difference is what brought me closer to the subject and understanding of writing.
As I started to grow closer to writing my writing improved. When I was younger and disliked writing, I remember my writing was not as efficient as it could have been. However, as I grew older and began to enjoy writing, due to some teachers that helped show me the usefulness in it, I began to write better papers. Now, this could be because of my greater vocabulary or understanding of the subject, but I believe it is because of my actual enjoyment of writing and more openness to my own ideas. I was taught in high school to use word choice to better my papers. This is where I started to like writing because it made me feel as though I was smarter and gave me a way of showing my knowledge. I remember sitting in my classroom on the second floor of Eastern View High School in the back of the class enjoying writing a persuasive essay that had just been assigned to us because it made me feel empowered to say my personal opinion on the topic, which for this paper I believe I choose abortion or one of the other highly talked about social issues. Within this class, writing and rhetoric, I have now learned that I should express my own views, ideas, and style of writing. In the many articles and pieces we have read and made assigned reading sheets for we saw various styles of writing.
We have also learned how to look at our own writing and try to find our own style. I see my style through my writing process in which I like to just lay all of ideas out on a long piece with very little revision through this first step. Then after completing the amount of words requested I go back and thoroughly refine the piece. I cut the excess “fat”, being the words not needed to improve a sentence. Then I proceed to expand on the topics I brought up throughout the original paper. These original ideas tend to be broad so this expansion helps me show what I want to say. I usually have a difficult time speaking to people that I may not be in a close relationship with. In most occasions people can think that I am stuck up or think highly of myself since I may see them but not start up a conversation. However this is not the case, instead I am just a shy person who struggles with starting a conversation with people I only partially know, but I am an open book to anyone of my closest friends. This correlates into my writing as it helps me show people what I am like with my closer companions without me having to go directly to them and speaking with them in person.
In high school I had a selective group of friends that I trusted from Culpeper, my hometown, and the surrounding area. To these people I was an open book that would tell them anything that was on my mind, most times without any context or them even asking. Yet, I also had “acquaintances” that I was “cool” with but would never initiate conversations with. Many times I would even look at these acquaintances as I walked by them in the hallway, making eye contact without saying a word. This seems weird even to me, however, I could never seem to find the words to initiate a conversation. This is where writing has helped me. Writing gives me a way to just spit all of the things I want to say onto paper then go back and revise it to make sure I am saying what I truly mean. I believe this is what makes for my biggest problem with starting conversations with my partial friends. I feel as though I may make a mistake when I try to move my mouth to verbally exploit my sentences. Writing allows me to still depict my thoughts but go back and fix my mistakes before I present it.
This mindset has helped with my writing process. I tend to revise my paper’s many times looking for little mistakes from grammar to sentence structure. I find it enjoyable to do this as it gives me a way to perfect my ideas. I also have to do this as my papers start off with just bland ideas that I have for sentences that aren’t necessarily correct. The ideas that we have learned throughout our book for writing and rhetoric have taught me that these ideas are acceptable for writing. Some of the works we read showed how people just have different styles of writing. Others, like Shitty “First Drafts” by Anne Lamott, have showed me how students of all levels write terrible first drafts, but they dig deeper and find that even professional writers write bad first drafts from which they must revise and add onto multiple times to finally give a piece they are proud of. Anne Lamott said in Shitty First Drafts, “The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time”, showing how even from her professional stance that writing is a difficult task to complete (853). We tend to think that professional writers compose their final piece in one lapse, but they must revise it over and over again. As a young writer I take note of this and see how I am more like a professional writer than I thought. I also see the other necessary steps I must take to truly depict my ideas in a proper rhetorical manner.
My writing has developed along with me throughout my life. My writing process shows the type of person I am as I tend to struggle at stating the right thing the first time and need many revisions to truly say what I want. My early experiences with writing were not pleasant, but they helped bring me to the writer that I am now. I also used to see writing as something that could only be done well by professionals, but as I have seen from Anne Lamott’s piece, even the writers who focus most of their lives on perfecting writing cannot find a way to create a perfect draft. This has shown me that I am not alone in this step of the process and how creating a draft is difficult. It should not be perfect which I can relate to my process in the fact that I do not expect my drafts to be perfect but instead just a collection of my ideas that I want to say. These ideas I will revise later to make more sense for someone reading and trying to understand them. The final piece that I create helps me to show the reader the story or argument that I may have not been able to say.
Works Cited
Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Writing About Writing. Ed. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2017. 852-857. Print.