My first essay, “Enabling the Writer Within”, depicts my history with writing, opinion towards it and my predicted future with writing. I begin with my earliest known memory of writing and the writing practices I preformed as a child. As I grew, I gained more experience, and unfortunately formed negative opinions about writing.
In the second part, I go on to describe how writing has been a part of my life, and my thoughts on the purpose of writing. I viewed it as a requirement for completing a school assignment and not as a relief of emotions or expression of ideas. I discuss how writing is associated with society, and its importance in today’s environment.
Finally, in the third section, I depict how I see writing’s involvement in my life in the future. As I plan to be a civil engineer, I assume that there will be a great deal of reports, and building proposals which I will have to complete. But, I acknowledge that I will most likely not free write or use writing as a form or release. Although, as I go through college, I plan on mastering the skills required to write properly and efficiently.
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Essay 1: Enabling the Writer Within
Enabling the Writer Within
ERH 101, Section 1
Date Due: June 3, 2015
Date Sub: June 2, 2015
Paper 1
Help Received: Peer-revision,
Murray, Lammot, King,
Goodman, Haruf writings,
Class paperwork and discussion
My earliest and most significant memory of writing in my life, is when I was as child. My mother had me write in a journal, especially when I would travel out of the country, and she forcefully encouraged me to write in it. I would jot down a summary about each day and I never enjoyed it. This was mainly due to the fact that I was relatively forced to do it and I felt that I would never care for simple activities that I had done in the future, or if I were perhaps to reread these entries, I would not remember what had occurred on that specific day. For those reasons, writing has established a firm placement on my dislike list and I have never really enjoyed it since.
Further along in my childhood I recall performing paragraph write-up sessions in my fifth grade class. The teacher had a large poster paper and as a class we came up with a paragraph about roller coasters for example. She informed us of catching the reader’s attention with hooks and proper sentence flow. As sixth grade came however, and twisted my concepts and opinions of writing very negatively. My teacher would have us write many long essays on short poems and I hated it tremendously. Even my teacher in middle school agreed that analyzing poetry was not just about writing long essay, but more of understanding what the author intended.
It was not until this time in middle school where I began to understand this concept. Although from then I began to constantly question this process. It is dependent upon us, as individuals, to derive the author’s tone, opinions and meaning behind text while reading. To me it seems unimportant, particularly because everybody has different opinions and many may not agree with each other. I asked myself, what if we are completely misunderstanding what the author had wrote. Quite possibly, the author might not have a legitimate purpose or deeper meaning behind certain sections or the whole piece in general.
Moving into high school, I completed business letters, resumes, narratives, and many analytical literary pieces. When applying for my Eagle Scout rank, it was required that I submit a report and essay to a committee. This committee would then review my request and decide on whether or not to approve said request. Through my history of writing I never did any poetry for fun or free writing, I only wrote when I had an assignment in school. The term “freewriting” came as an oxymoron to me, everything I had done in the past had been for a requirement. The concept of “freewriting” seems absurd and very abstract to a person who had never received any enjoyment from writing in general. Although, I believe that writing for many people is a very effective medium of communication in today’s society. On social media individuals post or blog about random events in their lives very frequently and compose concise reports of what has occurred. I see writing as an activity forced upon me by my superiors, whether teachers or parents, solely because they had instructed me to do so, whether it was for a grade or some other academic purpose.
As part of my extreme displeasure of writing, I will often delay its completion as a form of retaliation or simply disinterest in undertaking the assignment. My writing process mainly includes creating a single rough draft which I will edit and revise as I go along. I mainly create compositions in this fashion due to my terrible habit of procrastination and possessing limited time to which I must complete the assignment as a result. Once I have completed the draft, occasionally in class I exchange my drafts with other peoples and receive feedback then I alter minor errors, such as grammar issues, sentence fragments, and overall flow. Primarily the draft I create the first time is what is usually refined a small amount.
From my past experience, writing has been for an assignment and for the purpose of completing it or not receiving a grade. Within my high school community, the purpose of writing existed for us to analyze certain texts. As a whole however, many individuals write for the entertainment of others, i.e. books and novels, an alternate explanation for writing is to inform the public of current events or of innovations in technology, updates about the government or certain companies. No doubt there are countless reasons for writing.
I do not perceive writing as a positive activity, although I do think it is vital for our society. It is the method in which we, as a whole, can document what is occurring for historical records. It is a way to express opinions and exchanging ideas, of course this method is not the only means of interaction. Writing holds roots in almost every single form of communication. When delivering a speech for example, the spokesperson most likely dictated his thoughts ahead of time, revising and reviewing to create an adequate presentation. Great orators organize ahead and fully develop their thoughts several days, weeks or months in advance preceding its delivery. Another example of this communication would be music. While there are many forms of this medium, a significant amount not exercising words specifically, composing music using notes and rhythms appears to be a language of its own. With that language musicians are capable of reading the music, processing the information specified and preforming to the authors intended outcome, much like those reading poetry or a novel. There are countless styles and genres, songs can contain lyrics and meaning, others may just be instrumental. It is an art form that involves an important form of writing and the passion that is associated with it.
These mediums of writing, music, books, articles, poems, etc. within our society is extremely important. It allows us to communicate in politics, inform general public, entertain and express views and opinions on the world. Writing is encompassed in every aspect of communication and many of the events and attitudes that experienced during this era would be forgotten, overlooked and undocumented. As said before, writing may be used for entertainment, stories, for example, may be told may be extremely positive, others may be controversial.
As I have grown and have further developed my role in society, it has become apparent how dependent we are on writing and communication. This reliance on writing for communication, via text or instant messaging, emails, and electronic reports to name a few, connects everybody. It is exceptionally challenging to imagine or predict society deprived of writing. Primarily due to the immense influence it has within our environment. In today’s technologically advanced age, the aspect of writing has taken on additional responsibility. Technology without a doubt has spread writing’s influence throughout the world. Yes, in earlier eras letters and books were written and writing was still profound in that society. However it is miniscule compared to the rate at which information it exchanged today. We demand writing in order to keep the peace and maintain basic survival.
My role in society in the future hopefully is as a civil engineer. During that time I expect to be conducting many reports and building requests which will require an intense level of formality. Again, I do not view my future self as a person who writes as an emotional release, as way of expressing themselves or just for the sake of writing. Nevertheless, that does not exempt me from having the responsibility of knowing how to do so. While attending VMI, I hope that I will be able to view writing as a positive medium of communication, and be able to develop effective strategies for adequate writing styles.
Throughout my time here no doubt my classes will mainly be centered on math and engineering, I anticipate papers on major mathematic figures, and environmental or structural reports for engineering courses. When addressing work in literature for my English and any other humanities courses, I will be required to analyze literary compositions, and look for the deeper meaning of the author.
As for example, each author read about in this course had a different topic or area of writing. They explained their views on, writing environment, shitty first drafts, attitude towards writing, restricting inner critic and allowing what you write to define you. From each passage I gained a different perspective of writing, and a new, optimistically positive, outlook and mindset towards writing. Realistically, during my time at VMI, I will strive to master proper writing skills in order for it to become as simplistic as math or sciences comes to me.
Going back to my future as an engineer, I do not want to have to worry about spending large quantities of time revising and rewriting reports. Instead I would prefer if I could exhibit the necessary skills to construct sound reports and have the ability to easily fix mistakes without having to stress out. I am very optimistic about learning effective abilities in planning, developing, and composing.