Week 7: Essay - Writing Through the Years

There aren't very many things I miss about high school. I don't miss having the same schedule everyday, I don't miss having to ask to go to the bathroom (only to be reprimanded by a teacher who wanted to know why I didn't go during the three minutes I had to get clear across the school), and I certainly don't miss the cafeteria food. What I do miss, though, was the requirement for an English class every year. I was one of the few people who didn't dread going to AP Lit everyday because we had to write. We wrote extensively in AP Lit, and our teacher was no easy grader. I took it for granted back then, furious when Mrs. Roel gave me a seven instead of a nine on a timed writing assignment, but now I realize that she probably improved my writing exponentially. Going into that class was a little like how I've heard other students describe some college classes - we were basically told that everything we'd learned up to that point, so essentially the past twelve years, was wrong. We were indignant, but now that I think about it, just about everything that I implement in my writing style now, I learned from that class. When we wrote our literary analysis papers in preparation for the dreaded AP test, we were reminded over and over (and over) that our analysis should contain a small amount of concrete detail in relation to commentary. To punctuate this idea, every time we wrote anything, as part of the editing process, we were to highlight our papers using two different colors: yellow for concrete details, and green for commentary. The idea was that we should have only one or two lines of 'yellow' for every several lines of 'green.' This was a slightly irritating and seemingly tedious practice, we felt, but we gritted our teeth and got on with it. Now when I'm writing a paper and I go back to edit, I think to myself, 'okay, there is way too much yellow here and not nearly enough green!' From that experience, I've learned how important it is to rely on analysis and commentary when writing a paper - to look deeper than what the text says in order gain a better understanding of what you are reading. This translates not only to literature, but to any kind of reading. I don't believe I would have understood that if I'd never had to look for the yellow and green in my papers.

This class has really reminded me how much I love writing. I've lived with a Letters major for the past three years and watching her stress and agonize over her various research papers (she is, admittedly, a bit of a procrastinator) made me think I was lucky that I, as a science major, had minimal writing to do. However, when I realized how much writing I would be doing for this class, instead of an impeding sense of doom, which one might expect from a Biology major who has been exposed to very little major writing, I found myself rather excited at the prospect. You see, science doesn't leave a lot of room for creativity. My life is governed, for the most part, by laws and theorems - Kinetics, Thermodynamics, Newtonian, and what have you - which are, for the most part, rigid and unchanging. This is the first class I've had in a long time - since high school, quite possibly - that has allowed me to stretch my abilities and really just create. Writing as much as I have for this class has allowed, and in some ways, forced, me to play around with my writing style. This class would be terribly monotonous if I were to write the exact same way every week so I enjoy challenging myself on a weekly basis. I believe this has really enabled me to grow as a writer - there are so many possibilities I had never considered! Perspective, setting, characterization, these are all words I knew only as a means of analyzing the writing of others, yet it never occurred to me that I could apply all of these concepts to my own writing. Now, I'm fascinated with each of these domains, along with many others, and try to take them into consideration with my writing every week.

I like to think that these two experiences have improved my writing. There is still so much to learn and I feel that I have such a limited time to do so. Being a science major doesn't leave a lot of room in my schedule for non-science classes, so I am trying to soak up as much as I can from this class. It is my hope, however, that I will be able to continue to improve my writing whenever I can. For now, though, I'm just enjoying the ride.

 

Image Information: Personal photo from Facebook - Me, my roommate Laura, our friend Sarah (far left), and my AP Lit teacher, Mrs. Roel at our high school graduation.