Thomas Reagan

ERH-102-01

Ms. Mattie Smith

21 June, 2023

Help Received: in class discussion, anything mentioned in other help received

The problem of persistent writing

Throughout my time in college, I have struggled with writing as I am sure many have.  Writing is not something that comes naturally or enjoyable to most, I was lucky enough to have it come naturally, and with this gift I would often just sprint through an essay.  I began to run into a problem with the structure of my papers being semi disconnected, or ramble like.  I could finish them quickly, but I felt as though there could be a better use of my time and a method to prevent failure through procrastination, a common habit of mine.

I decided early in this session to partake in a personal experiment in which I would spend more time to focus on planning.  I would not go as far as to say that I’ve managed writing better this semester, I have gone about it differently however, I would typically go about it by starting off with just the prompt, sitting down, and writing the entire paper in one sitting with no real planning or forethought, just doing it was my tactic.  Following just doing it I would go back in and fluff it up to a level where it got closer to the word counts that I needed.  Most papers from before this semester were written in the method that I go about writing this paper now which is my tried and true just write is as mentioned above.  In the rap world this would be called “off the dome” because I am just coming up with it as I go along and using my internal monologue to follow my thoughts and self-reflection currently.  Instead of this “write something and fluff it up” method, this semester I did a lot more preplanning, mainly in the form of making a scaffolding type of micro essay where I’d outline what would be in each paragraph, and then rapidly and vastly expand on the handful of words or sentences I had in each “paragraph” at this stage.  It would start from just a few words of purpose, or maybe a sentence, and be built out from the middle, working to the top and then to the bottom, treating the paragraphs as a miniature essay with an intro, conclusion, and body.  It has slowed me down tremendously in a way that I did not account for, and I believe that if I am to continue on with using such a method of pre planning that I ought to work through it much earlier than when I intend to do the actual paper.  It increases the total workload by nearly double.

There has been the beneficial consequence of making a more coherent piece of literature more suitable for human consumption than the squabble of my past writing which was entirely dependent on voice through writing and typically a rather sarcastic and critical tone.  I have been able to get some more pleading and hope into my recent work and expanded upon my range for writing and tone, which could be very useful in settings where persuasion is necessary in the future, such as board meetings, briefings, letters, etc…. There are many things in the military that being able to write persuasively with multiple different tones would be rather applicable to, so for these it may be better to work with the stronger planning method.  Obviously my just write stuff method did work to a degree, I type fast for prolong periods of time averaging around 80-90 words per minute, and if I take minor breaks to wipe my eyes, look around the classroom, or use the bathroom, I should be able to write 1500 word essays in a rate of three an hour, or one per twenty minutes.  I will have not however taken any opportunity to think, and I am realizing as I continue to write that if I maintain this pace of 80 words per minute and continue to write for the full 25 minutes allotted that I will have an absurdly high number of words on this paper, but I will almost surely run out of things to say before I reach that point.  This brings the consequence of talking a lot without saying anything, and risks wasting the time of the reader.  The professor in the class had given us a goal to reach in the 25 minute time span of 500 words for a “rough rough draft”, of which I would approach rapidly within the first six minutes, so I think I am good and do not really need to worry about a word count.

If I could theoretically finish the essays assigned throughout the class in 20 minutes each, it is highly unlikely that their quality would stack up to what is expected of us in this class.  I look at classmates every once in a while, and I can tell they do not think I am actually typing, one in specific just motions on his keyboard like he is and then hits backspace a couple of times afterwards so he thinks I am just typing gibberish on the computer, and to be fair this much could be argued as such.  I have broken a pretty high margin of words simply discussing the word count for most of the essays in this class, that 1500.  If I had felt worried about such things I could pull tricks such as spelling out more numbers earlier it could have been much higher but I am sure it would be incredibly obvious that it would be an attempt in trying to stretch for a word count, and this entire rough rough draft as it was called is rather indicative of my old writing style in which I would write what I had to say then spend time fluffing it up to meet word counts, as opposed to what I have been doing recently which is the process of actually planning things out, getting some sort of blue print down, making sure the points work together and then going through and actually fleshing it out from there, I like to think of it almost like building a person from the ground up, start with the bones, the basic structure, the really strong points, from there move into the muscle, it makes everything work and connects it all together, makes it able to move and do things, really gives the bones a purpose, then throw on the fat to make it up to the point where it meets all the asked for requirements and can last a little longer if it was left on its own, and finally the skin and all the stuff that people will see to make it look nice and pretty. It’s rather effective at making good papers, but again it’s not as fast as in the past I would be nearly done by that same stage that I would now be finishing with just the bones of a new style of essay.

There is also the issue with my older style of burnout.  Almost getting tired of typing at this point was commonplace, but necessary.  I’ve reached a thousand words in just under 12 minutes, which means I’ve been keeping up this pace pretty well.  I do feel like I’m slowing down now though as my hands begin to get a bit tired of the rapid pace at which I type, and I struggle to come up with more and more to talk about, I do think I would make a half decent filibuster if I became a politician, and a lot of my friends have told me I should be a lawyer or a politician with how good I am at arguing around rules and talking quickly and cleverly, though many people confuse slyness and cheeky comments for being clever, when they’re just a snide remark made quickly, of which that is my true specialty.  At the end of it all, who could know me better than I know myself, that’s the reason why we write our own reflective essays and not the teachers, because we are the only ones who really know what is going on inside the old melon as it were.  Another problem with my old writing was just trying to avoid getting too extremely repetitive or to the point where I begin to use common texting language like “ha-ha” or “lol”, but it would appear that if I keep up such a pace as that which I am maintaining now, I would not be able to avoid such a thing.  There has not been a single break in this essay yet and despite the changes in topic it has all been rather circular.  The problem with the stream of consciousness writing is that there is almost always a need to go back through and edit it, or see if I could find some points to place the breaks in for it to appear more as a traditional paper, and I could rearrange things so that this was some huge three paragraph grouping, slap a fancy intro on it, and submit these ramblings for me to be institutionalized for the rest of my life as a mad man.  With three minutes left, the goal of 1500 words is left insight.

My true motivation for my writing is that it is a means to an end.  If I don’t write I can’t get out of VMI, so despite my first paper here being titled I don’t write, it seems like I have caved, and this place has once more beat a man to mental submission at the feet of the oh so glorious “Mother I”, with her walls painted the distinct tone nicknamed by cadets as suicide beige.   So with the shortfalls of my writing in this semester, I believe I may have to revert to the cruder method of old, as it is simply more efficient with time and comes more naturally to me.