[Week 3] Essay - Writing about Writing

(image from Nic McPhee on Flickr)

               As most students, I’ve been assigned writing work since elementary school. When I was little, everyone would praise me for how good I was at creative writing. I had a crazy imagination and, although my technical skills weren’t good, my teachers all seemed to enjoy what I wrote. Until high school, I had only been praised for my writing and had never received any actual constructive criticism. I think because of this, I started to think that writing was easy for me and I didn’t need to try harder or improve more. So when I got to high school, I was down about how I had gone from being a good writer to a bad one.
                I took mainly advanced/AP English classes in high school. We mainly wrote critical essays on books, or analyzed poetry and wrote about the meaning of them. I was never very good at figuring out the deeper meaning behind things, so I was already bad at doing this. On top of that, I had never had to write so formally before. My papers were always pretty miserable. Because of the assignments we had to do, the amount of books we had to read, and the papers that I was always bad at, I started to dislike books and especially poetry.
                I managed to skip English Composition 1 in college by passing the AP test. My composition two class was laughable. The professor had us write small papers throughout the semester, but no matter how good our technical skill was, if we presented an argument that he rejected we would automatically get a bad grade. I was the only one in the class who managed to get an A because I realized this early on and stopped writing my opinions and wrote his instead. I have to do a lot of writing for my linguistics classes, and those kinds of formal linguistics research papers have a certain academic tone and conciseness to them that I have gotten used to writing in. More casually writings (like this one) have become a challenge to me.
                After studying abroad in Japan and generally putting more and more foreign words into my head, I can honestly say that I’ve become more forgetful when it comes to English words and grammar. It’s not that I’ve forgotten the language, I’ll just forget simple words. This has been frustrating me lately because there are a lot of times that I want to use a certain word in my storytelling posts, but I just can’t remember what it is. Hopefully as the semester goes on, I’ll become more comfortable with writing casually and creatively while regaining my English speaking abilities!