Week 3 Essay: My High School & College Writing Experience

My High School & College Writing Experience

My confession is that what writing skill I have cultivated over the years is not owed solely to the hours I spent working on papers in high school and college. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to say that I don’t owe my many past writing teachers a big thanks for helping me to improve as a writer. Writing is a talent, but it’s a talent that cannot ever be brought to fruition and maximized if it is not practiced often, and the great thing about school is that it gives you a lot of opportunity to practice, even if the genre it forces you to write in is not always to your liking. In my case, I’ve never been a fan of writing essays, although the exercise can be made less excruciating—even somewhat pleasant—if I’m writing about a topic that I actually like or care about.  

I would say that every writing class I have taken, from Comp I to Environmental Writing, has worked to improve my writing skill by small increments. Every essay is a new challenge, and each time I overcome the challenge my writing is a little better for it. That said, I’ve found that papers that present me with a particularly difficult topic tend to succeed the most in pushing me to improve my writing ability. To give an example, I took a class called “Literature and Landscape” that concerned itself primarily with gardens, literature, and occasionally their intersection as well. My second and final paper for the class had me researching a famous Japanese garden and then discussing its key features and what they do for the garden on both an aesthetic and symbolic level. Since I was not experienced in writing about such a topic, I had to adapt and learn how to effectively communicate in the language of a garden connoisseur. Although it was a bit difficult, and I ended up pulling an all-nighter putting the finishing touches to the paper, I came out of it a more versatile writer. The same can be said for when I had to write about the Porfirian period in Mexican history for another class, and when I wrote about the works of American Indian author Leslie Marmon Silko for a Native American Philosophy class. I’ve written more papers than I care to remember, but it was the ones that forced me to delve into more unfamiliar territory topic-wise that helped to improve my writing the most.

That said, writing essays for school constitutes only about forty to fifty percent of the reason behind my improvement as a writer over the years. I owe the other half of my improvement to two things: reading and writing for pleasure.  One should never underestimate the value of reading in helping a person to become a better writer. In my experience, reading improves grammar, punctuation, and allows one to gain a more firm understanding of a lot of the conventions of fiction. In my opinion if you want to write good fiction, then it is very important to read good fiction.

Writing for pleasure continues to be incredibly important in facilitating my growth as a writer. As I said before, I don’t typically enjoy writing essays, but I do really like writing fiction. As a result, I do it a lot, or at least I try to find the time to do it as often as I can. I recently finished a short novella that I plan to submit for publication in the future. I can say with confidence that the occasionally blood-sweating act of writing this story over the course of the month of July allowed me to make significant strides toward my ultimate goal of being a part-time short fiction writer. In addition, the ability to force myself to write even when I didn’t want to that I developed while working on the novella has helped me to become a more efficient and faster writer this semester.

Were I to teach a college class, I would like to assign papers that encourage creativity among my students. I personally really like the Wednesday Storytelling assignments for this class, and wouldn’t mind tasking students with similar assignments for a creative writing course, or possibly even a composition course. I would evaluate the students’ works based on the level of skill they demonstrate in such things as plotting, description, character development, and characterization. Overall, my goal would be to help my students to grow as writers without inhibiting their ability to use their imaginations and have fun while writing.

This is pretty much what I looked like in any given evening in July of 2014. The house is cold. (Personal photo)