When I was younger I was sure that I would one day become an English teacher and an author. I loved to read and I loved to write. I flew through books at a ridiculous rate and the library was my second home. I've found notebooks full of my old stories and passages. My love for reading hasn't changed at all through the years. I continue to devour words for entertainment and to shed light on confusing times in my life. My love for writing, on the other-hand, has definitely faltered over time. The more I learned about writing, the less I liked it. What I love about unregulated and complete freedom in a piece of writing is similar to what I love about raw music. I want to hear the song of a confused 16 year old girl or an angry adult. I don't only care about what the emotion is but also that the emotion exists. The result of picking up a guitar and creating a melody and set of lyrics as a therapeutic attempt, is the most beautiful kind of music to me. It's the same with writing. I don't want to write a poem that follows strict boundaries and guidelines or an essay about a certain topic, I want to write what I feel. When I was younger, writing straight from my imagination was praised and creativity was admired. As I get older, I spend most of my time writing for school assignments with more rules than I ever could have imagined. I hate that writing could ever be a chore for me.
What I really appreciated about this class was that for the first time, in years, I had freedom to write what I wanted to write about. I almost never felt burdened by the homework that I had to do. There were deadlines but I loved how flexible everything was because writer's block was understood. I remember when we had a class discussion, for our first assignment, about whether it should be graded based on grammar or not. I thought that was the coolest thing, and I ended up writing something I had wanted to acknowledge to myself for a long time. My process essay was definitely therapeutic to me and I have been considering giving a copy of it to my mother to read. The only assignment I really had trouble with was the research paper. I am really bad at writing formally and that's typically how a research paper should be written. I also have trouble setting out facts without voicing my own opinion. Unfortunately, it's something I have to work on because, like it or not, I am going to need to write a bunch more of those kinds of papers throughout college and I do want to do well. I think I was a little too idealistic in my choice of research paper topics because I ended up having so much trouble finding information to use in my paper. While it is something I am passionate about, it doesn't seem like there are many scholarly people writing papers with a similar thesis to my own. I am kind of upset that the Research Essay is worth the most points because I think it was the least inspiring of all the writings I have done this year. My favorite assignment was the movie. I had never really understood rhetoric or how to express it before I created my short film. It was really interesting to use different argument techniques in a visual form. I learned a lot about understanding visual rhetoric from the Frick Analysis which was helpful for using it in my movie. I had trouble expressing my thesis statement in the Research Paper but illuminating it in that different format was so relieving. We read a lot of different views on the concept of writing though-out the semester. Some I agreed with and some I definitely did not. My very favorite quote, from everything we read, is by Peter Elbow, "“stop trying to write well. otherwise you will never write well at all”. I did stop writing for a while but this quote kind of motivated me. Free-writing is awesome and it is the stage at which the most important aspects of writing take place. In the Dweck response, I wrote, "Dweck was very confident in that people can change their mindsets to change their lives, and I couldn't agree more. She feels there are two kinds of mindsets, the growth mindset and the fixed mindset. A growth mindset is the idea that an individual is aware that possibilities are endless, that the world is their oyster, blah blah blah, and a bunch of other cliche's. A fixed mindset is based around being consumed with feeling stuck and helpless.". I like the idea of the two mindsets. I do think they blend a little and that there isn't such a strict line between the two, but I do think the differences exist. I like to think I am mostly of the growth mindset but I'm not entirely sure. One of the main things I didn't agree with were the views of both Zinsser and Vonnegut about "cutting the fat". I like words, It's obviously not a good idea to ramble on because people get bored, but words can be really beautiful and I wouldn't want to cut them down. I love to write and I don't want rules or deadlines to crush the spirit and creativity I could have in my writings. I'm going to walk away from this class remembering what Peter Elbow said. I won't try to write perfectly rather I'll just try to write like me. During this semester I looked for an old notebook I had used to write the first couple chapters of a novel. I think I lost inspiration and interest over time, but I've been feeling really inspired recently and I've been writing a lot. Out of all the kinds of writings we tried this semester, the Process Essay was my favorite because of the freedom I had writing it, and the emotion it harnessed. I am really proud and happy to have created my movie and written the process essay. |