Solomon Harris

ERH 101-05

Essay 4

There is a common misconception that being a natural writer, someone who writes perfectly usually only needing one draft, determines whether one is a “good” or “bad” writer. Under this belief, if a writer needs multiple drafts that shows that they aren’t a good writer since they are reviewing and rewriting parts of their essay, and making corrections in parts that may need improvements. In order to be considered a “good” writer, however, one must be a natural writer. (Gerstein 876) This chapter has shown me the exact opposite of this belief. As explained by several texts in this chapter, like the “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” by Nancy Sommers, it is the process of editing, revising and writing new drafts that makes one a better writer. They see areas of improvement, where they can better themselves through their writing, clarify their ideas and ensure that it is comprehensible for the intended audience. Making these changes can help make the writing better, although it is not impossible to write a really good first rough draft too. Therefore it isn’t really the amount of times or attempts one takes that evaluates them as writers, but rather the finished product and how well it was put together and displayed. Striving to be a better writer allows writers to be able to ensure that their finished product satisfies the prompt, genre and the textual desire of the intended audience, which is essentially the end goal of any piece of writing.

At this point in my own writing career, I still don’t truly know what kind of writer I am in terms of being just “good” or “bad”, largely because there is no defined criteria that qualifies one as being one or the other. In the grand scheme of writing itself, limiting oneself to only be considered either “good” or “bad” seems limiting, since every writer has strengths and weaknesses in different areas. Some writers may be better at different forms of writing than others. For example, people who excel at writing poetry may lack the skills to write research papers, or someone who can write a great autobiography may not know how to write a fictional short story. I am a perfect example of this, considering that my classification as a writer relies upon my inconsistency in my writing; with some topics I can write pages upon pages, while with other topics I can sometimes have a hard time thinking of the first sentence, showing that pending on the topic I can either be a “good” or “bad” writer. I am fairly proficient at writing about research or making arguments, but I have a hard time writing poetry or reflections of other texts. I don’t know if that is a result of a lack of exposure to different topics or genres, or an inability to think outside of the box, but my inconsistency is the only thing that has proved to be consistent throughout my writing career. There are still topics that I just hate writing, no matter how many times I try. Despite this, I know that I have steadily improved over the years, and I am still progressively bettering my writing skills every time I write. I have always been able to write well in response to prompts with topics that require me to write about myself, experiences or interests, and in genres that I am comfortable with, such as research and argumentative papers. Therefore, if I were to classify myself as a writer, it would be through my goal as a writer: to become better in all forms of writing, rather than just the forms of writing I prefer or am more skilled with. 

Despite still not being the most enthusiastic writer there are a few topics and writing genres that interest me. Topics revolving around sports, exercise, science, and novels all interest me, mainly because they are all hobbies of mine. Papers such as the Disproportionate Representation of African Americans as Coaches Compared to Athletes, or an essay about certain themes present in the Lord of the Flies, two papers that I wrote in high school, I could go on and on about. One because of my love for sports and research, which I had to collect in order to write the paper, and the other because of my love for a good novel, specifically the Lord of the Flies, one of my favorite books. Also, the basic topics that college and scholarship applications ask, “what are your plans for the future?” or “how would you describe yourself as a person?”, are great for me because I can almost talk nonstop about myself. There’s nothing in the world that I know better than myself and my past, present and future, which allows me to easily respond to topics such as those. Another genre of writing that I love writing is argumentative writing. I love having the opportunity to pick a side of  controversial topic, and then battling the other group to either prove a point or come to an agreement. Having to form your own argument, and back yourself up with evidence, as well as criticizing views of others is really intriguing to me, and fun to participate in and write. Topics that I am not attracted to includes just about every other category of writing. I highly despise writing about anything regarding philosophy, poetry, other texts written in modern-day english, and history just to name a few. With english and history being my least two favorite subjects, they definitely would not be my choice for topics to write about, nor would anything that I may have a harder time understanding rather than writing about, like poetry and texts on philosophies or old enlgish. I prefer to have a full understanding of the topic at hand before writing about it. That is why I like doing research, because you have the ability to look up information to provide context for a prompt or topic, allowing you to become knowledgeable and ultimately more comfortable with responding.

Throughout my writing career, in an effort to better myself as a writer I would focus on the processes of planning and revising, which I believe are the two most important practices every writer should use. I had to create my own writing process that would be applicable to all essays whether I was comfortable with the topic and/or genre or not; a process that began to form itself when I was in elementary school, the foundation for my writing skills. Elementary school helped me develop my own planning process, which at that time was the stage called brainstorming; formulating ideas and points to discuss in response to the topic. Brainstorming was the most beneficial stage for me especially for my writing style. It was a time for me to get out every idea possible that I had on the provided topics. Now, rather than using web diagrams as I did in elementary school, I just make lists of random  points that connect to the topic. I try to do this with every essay, before actually composing any complete paragraphs. It wasn’t until high school that I began to develop my own revision process. Originally, as taught in elementary and middle school, revision was just a process of making minor corrections on grammar and essay structure, but as I improved my writing abilities, my focus for revisions shifted to looking for areas where I could improve the flow of my writing, paragraph and sentence transitions, and just making sure I am fully responding to the provided topic. This helped me greatly with creating a better quality finished product, making revision a more valuable step in my writing. Both planning and revising have helped me establish myself as a writer, as well as the type of writer I am. My diligence with making sure that I incorporated both steps in my writing process showed that I am trying to better myself. I have never really been the most enthusiastic about writing, but forcing myself to pre-plan before writing and revise my first rough draft has helped tremendously with making me feel more comfortable before writing, while still just getting connected with the topic, and also after writing, knowing that I submitted my best written work possible for that given prompt. 

This writing process of focusing on planning and revising has helped me respond to essay topics and in certain genres which have either had a positive or negative effects on how much I could write in response to the prompt. With topics that I am more comfortable with writing about, I can usually just go on forever talking about the topic. I don’t really have to spend much time prewriting. In some cases, I can start the essay off by just beginning to write, without any planning at all. When this is the case, whatever I write in that first draft usually becomes my final as well, because I don’t revise that much either. With topics I am comfortable writing, I feel that I don’t need to revise my essay as much as I would have to for an essay I’m not really interested in writing, since ideas can come to me so easily. With topics I’m not interested in, I have to put in more effort to complete. This consists of, at most, half an hour of just pre-planning what I will write, since the hardest part for me with uninteresting topics is just thinking of something to write, and then how to make it long enough to  fulfill the criteria of the essay. Sometimes when I encounter brain freezes where I can’t think of anything additional to talk about, I stop and brainstorm even more, just jotting down ideas or anything I can think of to relate to the topic. In regards of revising, I try to spend as much time as possible. Taking time with my revisions, helps me make sure that I don’t make as many mistakes, makes sure that I am on topic and that in response to the prompt is clear.

One of my most recent uses of this process was with my senior thesis paper, which was entitled the Disproportionate Representation of African Americans as Coaches Compared to Athletes. In this essay, I analyzed the racial diversity in certain coaching and executive positions in the sports industry, botht the professional and college level and compared it to the racial diversity of the actual athletes. Although this essay included to of my interests: sports and conducting research, it was pretty hard to write, mainly considering that it was a 16 page paper. Because of its length, I went through an extremely long planning process, which was made even longer because of all the research I had to do on the history of the issue, to provide evidence for the results I found in my study. I continued my process of finding several large subtopics to talk about within the essay and then I organized them into an order that would make the most sense reading. I started off with an introduction, in which I introduced the topic, diversity in sports, and the problem, a lack of diversity in some positions, within it, followed by a literature review containing the history of the widespread discrimnation that was found in the sports industry in the early to mid 1900s. I then proceeded to my method in which I broke down how I would conduct the project: collecting numerical data from an organization (TIDES )that provides annual hiring report cards with grades for  the statistics of gender and racial hiring. The method was followed by the results I found from the study and the conclusion that summed everything up. My revision process with the paper took just as long as the planning. I spent a lot of time removing unnecessary information, sometimes because it was sort of irrelevant but sometimes because I researched to much information and went over the maximum number of pages. Originally I had a lot of excess history around the topic, that was good to know, but just to in depth and sort of off topic from the main focus of what I was trying to study. When writing, I had to make sure everything I typed was in the proper chronological order. The literature review, the history around the topic, needed to be in proper chronological order of how it actually happened in the past, while the method and results needed to be written in the order of the steps I took to conduct the study, and then gather and share my results. (Harris)

Even though this writing process has drastically helped me with my writing, it doesn’t mean that I am a perfect writer; there is still room for improvement. One area is probably my organization of ideas. I can think of new ideas fairly well, but when it comes to grouping them with other ideas and ordering them within my essay I reach a little bit of difficulty. Sometimes there are just too many ideas to look at, at once, leaving me troubled with figuring out where to place what. Another area where I could still use some improvement would be just providing examples to make my writing less broad. Using examples in my writing can help the reader understand what the writer is trying to say better, especially if it is an example they are knowledgeable of or can relate to. This essay, for example, is one essay with which I originally had a struggle with providing examples. Thus, in my faculty and peer review sessions, it was suggested that I think about how to incorporate them into my writing somehow. Continuing to work on these few areas will only contribute to my goal of bettering my writing skills, and being the best writer I can be.

Gerstein, Josh. “Sotomayor: Writing a Challenge ‘even today.’” POLITICO, 4 June 2009, www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2009/06/sotomayor-writing-a-challenge-even-today-018902

Harris, Solomon. Disproportionate Representation of African Americans as Coaches Compared to Athletes. Richmond Community High School