My Years As A Writer

It is essential to understand that classes taken in grade school do not give students a full understanding of each subject. With the topic of writing, there will always be a new lesson to learn, an aspect to improve, or a differing way to explain. Author Craig Vetter states in Bonehead Writing, “This is your enemy: a perfectly empty sheet of paper. Nothing will ever happen here except what you make happen.” Each story, essay, or response comes from a writer’s experiences. With each attempt at a new piece comes an underlying story of emotions the writer is facing. Each person’s writing is unique and the ideas people have are related to their past experiences and what they believe to be familiar with when deciding which writing style to use. As a high school student, I have learned many things about writing that helped me become the improved writer I am today, but the most essential advice I have received is practice makes perfect. Although there is no actual perfect way of writing, I have discovered that each essay I write, my writing improves. It is easier to spot mistakes, find areas to improve, and ponder elevated word choice to use.

From a young age, I have always been taught to understand the value of education and learning. Reading and writing have been emphasized to me as tools for success, that should always be constantly improved, for as long as I can remember.

I was pushed constantly to work harder at my writing. I studied and practiced several new techniques and methods for prewriting and organizing the essays I found so hard to create. At first, I had quite a few bad days and quite a few subpar essays. My grades would vary greatly from paper to paper. This really scared me, as I hoped to keep myself from drastically dropping in my grades. Yet, I wanted to maintain my grade point average so I had no choice but to succeed and impress around every corner. I began to pour in, even more, work and apply all of the newly learned skills from that class into my mind. I hoped that soon I would be able to find a system for writing that helped me form proper

When I started my first semester of college, I was very worried about writing essays and research papers. I felt like my writing skills lacked greatly compared to other students. I knew a few things of which I could improve on right off the bat, such as my vocabulary skills and organizational skills. To say the least I was very nervous about how my writing composition course would be like and did not think it would go very well for me. However, I learned so many techniques that have helped my writing skills grow. It all started with learning how to stay organized, planning what to write in your essay in outline form and sticking to it really helped when writing essays. These techniques helped me become more confident in my essays and allowed writing essays to become a lot easier. The few aspects in which I am strong in while writing essays is my ability to stay organized, focused and be very clear about what I am writing. Nonetheless, there is always room for improvement; a few things that I can think of being grammar and punctuation due to no revising, embedding quotes smoothly, and citing sources correctly.

Initially my writing lacked structure and a controlling purpose which caused my ideas to be incoherent and hard for the reader to understand. These difficulties could be attributed to the fact that I am an art student plagued with the disorganization and non-verbal method of an artist’s brain. Being this way, interpreting and conveying my thoughts accurately and eloquently into the assigned writings was fairly tough. However, during the course of English 101 I was able to identify my weaknesses through the aid of writing communities such as peer review sessions and conferences with my professor. With the help from these resources and the writing process I learned to better organize my essays and maintain a controlling purpose in order to help my audience

Essay writing became difficult when I started 10th grade Honors English. My papers would never get above a C which baffled me. I had done well in previous English classes prior and received high marks on all my creative writing assignments. By the end of the year I realized it had to do with my thought process. My imagination wasn’t beneficial when it

I, one of millions of first-year college students, believe that I write bland essays due to the fact that my high school English teachers failed to teach me how to think clearly and creatively. For instance, with my twelfth English teacher, Mrs. Tuttle, there are many cases to which I felt she could’ve improved her teachings not only for me to understand how to write a well-developed paper but as well as others students. First case scenario being how she gave class activities and her teaching style. She had a way of giving activities based on the feeling of how she felt would be a good way for us to learn the material versus what we felt would be the best way to learn the material. These ways included little to no group work. Writing a bunch of illegitimate papers that would be graded by my peers who had little to no idea of what right or wrongs they were looking for. Thus for leaving me with an ambiguous reason to what my writings were lacking or why I never made anything higher than a C in her class. Another way would be the fact that she lived off the teaching theory of “if one can do it then all can do it”. This hands down was the number reason why I could never write a well thought out, clear and creative paper. With this method she felt that if Amanda Ho, class valedictorian, could write an outstanding paper, then the entire Class of 2015 could write one just as well. Never coming to an understanding that everyone wasn’t Amanda Ho, everyone didn’t have the brains

Originally I hated having to read and write, it was a horrendous repeated process that I was forced to uptake everyday of my academic life. All up until my dad started playing audio books in the car on the way to school. Now I can thank my dad for encouraging my sister and me to read, because without his guidance I would still hate reading and writing.

When I look back at my writing before having any college experience, I can see that I had a lot to work on. I can say that I was never really a big fan of writing anything much less essays. Even when I was younger, I just did not have a great big interest in writing. This was because I felt that I could not elaborate as well as others. I was not use to having to write anything really, but I now feel that I have a better grasp on the steps that I need to take to get my writing on the level that it needs to be.

In regards to writing, I have always struggled to meet all of the requirements for a perfect paper that includes a well-organized text filled with rich analytical sentences. In the beginning of the semester I constantly worried about the structure of my writing and its overall material. In high school it was important for me to complete my essays by answering the questions that I was given, but in college, students go more into depth. College students are required to focus on grammar, and well-structured ideas that flow along with rich analytical content. After I was given my first assignment I was pressured to improve my overall work by focusing on structure and developing analytical content. Assignments such as the weekly readings and writing assignments helped me improve my overall work. Through the narrative essay, artist research essay and Storify project I focused on many aspects that improved my writing. For all of my assignments, it was useful to use techniques, such as, reading out loud to revise the structure of my work and going into depth with description.

During the four years I spent in high school, it was real hard for me to write an essay or just a simple paragraph. And it was all, because I couldn’t express what I thought or I just couldn’t write something down. Yet, when the teachers would tell me to write something down, I was always the last one to finish. Why? because I couldn’t think of anything to write. Or sometimes it was the timing that the teachers would give us to write that distracted me a lot from doing what I had to do. And since English is my second language is hard for me to write and think in English. And right now I still have that problem and it's real hard for me to write something down when a teacher ask me too. Also, another problem that I have is that sometimes

One of my most challenging experiences in writing was actually in Virginia Wesleyan College. During my last semester, I was taking Professor Ruh’s ENG 250 class called 19th Century American Women Writers, and we were required to write a few literary analytical essays on novels and short stories that were written by women during the 19th century. Even though the class was very interesting, I was having such a hard time writing my essays that I actually thought I would never be able to pass his class after I failed my first essay. I am usually the type of student that never asks for help because I would often feel intimidated by my teachers. However, I managed to speak up and ask for his help throughout the entire semester and because of that,

Throwing back my three years in high school, my writing skill was bad. In English class, when I was a Sophomore, my English teacher used to call me into her office. She told that my essay was full of bad grammars and too vague. As a result, she gave the lowest score in the class. Also even when we wrote the college application, most English teachers told my essays were too vague. Fortunately, after a few revise, it was getting better

As a student in High School, my writing composition was not very well developed. Although, I got help from my teachers, in addition to that, on my free time I went to the library to make extra corrections that were needed. My dad also helped me all throughout high school by reading over my essays and making comments on what I need to improve on, but even then I believe that my writing could have improved. I have tried to find strategic ways to improve my writing and I believe that I may slowly be getting there.

There are many writing styles that many people pick up as they go through there many years of schooling. Each person picks up the same type of writing styles but as years go by people seem to pick up there own little types of writing style that separates them from everyone else. As I have gone through many years of English classes I have acquired more and more skills and many more are sure to come as I continue my education. My writing skills have only gotten better from the time of ninth grade English class until today. Since my days back in junior high school I was only taught the basic skills to write papers and since then they have grown to make me a decent writer. I have many strengths and also