Description – This essay describes my feelings about writing before I got to VMI. I felt like it was bad to be a novice writer and that I would never be good enough to write in college. I addressed my thoughts about the future, my plans for my career, and how writing will effect that.
The transfer from high school to college is an immense change. There are more assignments to be done, with less time to do them in, and more is expected of you. Going back to even the early days of writing, it was always a difficult time. In first grade language arts class, my teacher, Mrs. Carpenter, had a hard time getting me to understand how to write the letter “s” and “q”. She had to have private tutoring sessions with me because I never could quite grasp the concepts of simple things like the shapes of the letters. Later on, during my senior year of high school, my first AP Literature assignment was to write a personal narrative about a time where I had faced adversity. On the due date I walked into my class with my head held high, thinking that I was going to have one of the best papers in the class. I turned it in with the most confidence I’ve ever had while turning in a paper. Two weeks passed and we finally get our papers back. The paper that was put on my desk had a “67/100” in big red in on the top of it. I was devastated and confused as to what I had done wrong. After class I asked my teacher and she had told me that “there was nothing narrative about the paper” and it “didn’t have enough description” to be a personal narrative. These two moments are pivotal moments in my writing career. They shaped the perception I had of myself as a writer because I always questioned my abilities. It was at those moments that I believed that my writing could never compare to that of my peers and that I would never be able to grasp the concept of what it took to be a “good writer”.
All of this has always made me sway towards thinking negatively about writing because writing is all personal. Whether it’s a research paper, or a personal narrative, the writing directly reflects the author and their ability to produce a good piece of work. Unlike math or science, where you could struggle in the class because you don’t understand the content which is detrimental to the comprehension of future concepts, English classes either produce quality writers or students who struggle to develop a simple sentence. There’s usually never an in between.
My first step in writing is to get all my thoughts down on paper so that I don’t forget anything I might want to say. The second step is to type everything up exactly the way I hand wrote it. This is where I find most of my mistakes, so if something doesn’t make sense, I’ll fix the sentence, or paragraph all together, and then keep typing whatever is left of the hand written paper. After everything is typed I print out what I have and then take a break. This break is crucial because after hours of writing the same paper, it’s hard to read it again and find mistakes. The third step is to edit, edit, edit. The last step is the optional read through. If I feel confident enough in my writing then I will skip over this, but in most cases I’ll read through to double check everything I’ve written.
Over the years I’ve tried many different methods of writing and this is what works best for me. The redundant steps in this process help to reassure myself that I didn’t miss anything and that everything is fluent and concise. Another key component to being a good writer is being relaxed. If I’m not relaxed, or I feel rushed in any way, my writing will be worthless. It’s worthless in the sense that it’ll either be inconcise or it will just not make sense.
Writing is frustrating to everyone. Professionals and novice writers alike, getting the first words on the page is the most difficult thing to do in the writing process. Once that’s out of the way it doesn’t get easier because about two-thirds of the way through a ginormous wall flops down between you and your computer. These two problems are what shape my personal perception of writing. Writing is meant to be a way to express yourself. Whether that is in the form of emotion or knowledge or thoughts, everything is an expression of yourself and distinguishes you from all of the other writers in the world.
Writing is important to society because of this distinguishment from everyone else. Everyone, at some point, feels the need to express themselves. Now this doesn’t just apply to essays that are assigned in college or novels that are New York Times “best sellers”, this applies to everything that is online and printed as well. The majority of teenagers tweet or use Instagram and those are all forms of writing too. Even though Twitter has a 180 character limit per tweet, that teaches writers to compose thoughts that are short and to the point, in order to fit everything in one tweet for the whole world to see. Social media posting does not only apply to teenagers. Many adults use facebook to keep in touch with old classmates or family members, in lieu of mail or email. Posting a group of pictures or a paragraph everyday to the general public has been easier than addressing someone personally and talking to them.
Texting has also, especially within the last 10 years, become a new epidemic of communication. A majority of people would rather send a short text, rather than make a phone call. I, personally, would even rather text than talk on the phone. It makes multitasking easier and is more convenient. Our society could not function without the use of writing, in any shape or form. Our systems of communication would fail and the world would go to chaos. Along with that, people wouldn’t know how to express themselves, they would have to find new avenues and styles to do so.
On a smaller scale, compared to the worldview of writing, I can only picture myself doing academic styled writing at VMI, especially during the ratline. There isn’t much time for personal gain, so writing for fun is out of the question. Since my major is International Studies, I picture myself doing a lot of research papers on either history or current events. This will help me develop as a writer because even though they are academic writings, they are what I enjoy researching and writing about. My time and focus will be spent on trying to expand my knowledge and express that, not only on my tests but also in my future writings.
Something I would like to change about my writing is the fluidity of it. I often find in my revisions that there is rarely good connections between paragraphs, which sometimes may make my writing hard to follow, making the validity of my paper weak. I want to be able to approach a paper confidently and know that I’m going to do well on it. I want to be able to read through my paper and know that when I turn it in that I think it’s one hundred percent the best writing I’ve ever done, every time I write. This comes with development and experience with writing. As I develop I will become more confident in what I produce. This will be helpful in the future because of the occupation I want.
Once I graduate VMI, I plan to be an Air Force officer. Being an officer in any branch of the military takes quality writing and communication skills. I will need to be able to write long descriptive Operation Orders for plans that I want to be carried out. Along with long papers, such as an Op. Order, I’ll also have to write reports on things that happened during training and reports about details of my line of work. Things like this will take the skills of a knowledgeable writer to produce quality work, which is important because depending on the situation it may endanger or save many lives.
In any aspect of the military this will be true because the soul job of the military is to protect and defend the United States of America. It seems silly to say that a simple piece of paper could jeopardize all of that but there are many instances where that is true. One of the more recent instances is the the Hillary Clinton scandal. Because she wrote that she didn’t think that the men in the compound in Benghazi needed more protection on the night of the attack, four American lives were lost. This is such a big ordeal because if she didn’t write that the men didn’t need backup then the men that were killed may still be alive now. Things like this prove to the world that our writing can impact many lives, which is why it’s important to be cognizant of what you write and how you write it.
A warning to all: be conscious but be confident. Be conscious in a sense that you know for a fact when you produce something it will not affect the lives others in a negative way. Whether you think so or not, the minute details matter and can change the entire piece of writing, for either the good or the bad. Along with that, you also have to be confident in what work you do produce. Do not compare yourself to other writers, because you will never see yourself to be as good as they are, even if in the eyes of your readers you are better. If you never question the beautiful thoughts that your mind produces then you will always be a successful writer.