I went into this writing process believing that I do not have a process.  The very fact that I had already though about this before writing anything proves that I do have at least some format that I follow, no matter how minute or abstract it is.  While earlier in my writing I may have believed such things as someone can have no process, this was a very shallow ideology that lacked any self-reflection.  I now realize however that even though it may be downright awful, and undeserving of being referred to as a process, there is a method I follow.  My method is full of short sighted mistakes that I recognize quite often and appear in all facets of my writing.  The way that I go about writing papers is extremely flawed and inefficient, giving into all of my bad habits, such as procrastination, low effort, and over pridefulness.

All of these issues of course feed into each other, and snowball into an out of control mess that I cram into the MLA format and submit for surprisingly high grades.  The key cause of my literary pitfalls has to be my bad tendency of procrastination.  For some odd reason my brain comprehends that the last minute is the right time to write.  As the phrase goes, there is no time like the present, and that is because there is no time in the future, it has all since past.  No matter what my rational brain decides on when I should begin writing, or how I should divide up the work for the time, things just do not happen that way.  I will go through pier review sessions, all the rough drafts that are meant to be ready for class, and get to two days before the paper is done, and have only a header and a title down on a word document in terms of progress on my paper.  Zero planning has occurred, just me sitting at my laptop, daydreaming for a while, recognizing I have done no work, and coming up with some form of “clever”, generally sarcastic title that has nothing to do with the content of my paper as I have yet to think about what my paper will be about.  This title does generally give me some direction to start in, although the paper often veers off course wildly and goes in an entirely new direction, cutting through proverbial jungle and breaking multiple literary traffic laws in the process.

Now this last minute rush is often caused by a lack of effort to apply some self-discipline and get the work done.  My low effort leads to most essays having a lack of clear structure from the start, and instead reading as some rhetorical stream of consciousness from a hairless ape with a glorified typewriter.  The flow of my papers benefits greatly from this, however it does create a feeling of disregard for the common conventions of college coursework, and despite this being entirely accurate, it is not necessarily a good thing for my writing, seeing as it is work for a college course.  This lack of effort throughout the process also leads to my writing often failing to meet standards such as word count or content.  I seem to have gotten lucky this year, and the wonderful Ms. Smith finds my lazy attempts at rushing out a paper to simply be a strong voice, and while this is correct, it is probably more credit than I am due.  The lack of effort has also led to a particular issue in my most recent paper, this issue being that it is still not finished as of the time of writing this new critical work.  Once every few weeks, due to my lack of effort, I am forced to become a worker in the sweatshop of literature for a single long night in order to complete a paper, with the exception of the most recent which I failed to complete.  I have already failed a portion of the prompt for this particular essay, that being “applying what you learned in this chapter”(Wardle & Downs 235).  If I had done this, I most likely would have had the majority of the paper done before the conference on what was actually just two sentences.  Throughout my critical reflections, I looked upon myself critically, noted what had to change, and then changed absolutely nothing.  This further reflects the lack of effort I consistently apply.

The lack of effort, which leads to my procrastination, is often allowed to exist by my overconfidence in my writing ability.  When it comes to typing something out, I am cocky.  This is why for the longest time I did not believe that I had a writing method.  I was under the impression I was some literary genius that could quite simply sit down and crank out papers worthy of an A in under an hour with no preparation.  Overtime I have come to recognize that I am not in fact William Shakespeare.  I was too caught up in my own mediocre ability to realize even now that this full paper I have written on continued bad habits in my writing can be seen as an algorithm that I follow, proving my process exists, no matter how poor it is.  Because I so greatly overestimate my own writing ability, I find that I do not believe I need to sit down and plan it out.  I do not believe that I need to apply real effort, or do the work ahead of time, and thus, I do not.  So once more, the end result is of my own making and that is of suffering late at night for the right word to craft a wonderfully flowing sentence that over complicates a simple point in an attempt at the appearance of sophistication and a moderately heightened word count, this sentence being just that.

The procrastination in my process negatively effects my writing through creating a rushed time frame in which limited creativity can prosper and present itself on the page, desperately long sentences to meet direct quotas are instead favored.  A lack of effort leads to often negative sounding pieces, with extremely strong voice but little or limited subject matter beyond the surface level of the prompt or relating to previous pieces and course material such as the engaged reading sheets.  Class time is often wasted in favor of simply talking, and work beyond the papers themselves and the critical reflections is rarely, if ever, done.  Word counts are rarely ever neared, and rubrics are ignored near entirely.  Over confidence fuels the above problems and amplifies them, as well as disarms my rational attempts at addressing them quite regularly.  So, while my process may exist, perhaps I would be better off if it did not.  It must be by pure luck or the intervention of God that I am capable of creating anything legible, let alone decent, or even in rarity good works in such short spans of time with such little prework.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Wardle, Elizabeth. Writing about Writing. Bedford/St. Martin’s, Macmillan Learning, 2020.