Nicholas Barnard
College Writing
Thomasenia Hutchins
Given the college prep high school I went to coupled with difficult instructors who would make any high school student flinch, I should be a by the book structure, content and form confined writer. I am not by nature a confined writer. As a matter of course I defy and violate all of the “rules” required for the English language essay.
Structure as an English speaker begins when you learn to speak; the essay strongly begins at the end of middle school. At the beginning of high school I knew the structures and used them extremely poorly against the general beliefs of my instructors. I failed to support both of my “groundbreaking” essays, one comparing Romeo and Juliet a cheap romance novel, and the other a satirical documentation of the negative relationship that my instructor and I had developed. This lack of success caused me to doze and turn in mediocre works in my sophomore and junior years. The mediocrity and the conditions I created for myself drove me to plagiarize two works my junior year, one of which was purchased. This academic fall mirrored a psychiatric deterioration, that was finally diagnosed and treated half way through my senior year of high school. My writing marginally improved afterwards, but not to a satisfactory level according to instructor's feedback in my grades.
The academic fall of my writing did not hinder the leisure side of my writing, but all of my writing suffers from common problems. My sophomore year I wrote and directed, Listen, a one act play. My original intent for the play got befuddled through the gravity assisted ink dispensing devices that solidified and revised my thoughts on paper. I have found no correlation to the number of revision to the quality of my work. Often one or two revisions suits my personal needs, but in the case of Listen, which was revised even during the week of the performance, I still failed to convey the intended message. In other cases the first copy provides all the intended message.
I could continue to blame the Bic company for my writing problems, but the actual source is myself. I seem to be unable to express my ideas, and vision on paper in the true vitality they deserve. The source of this lack of the full communication of my ideas is a mystery to me, I know somewhere it lies in the organization or revision processes, but my attempts to fine tune these processes have yielded little progress.
My goal as a writer is to become persuasive, unique, and able to satisfy the “essay” rules without cramping my individuality. The first step in this destination is this essay, that I will use as the beginning of my new identity as a writer, one who is able to describe and communicate my visions to the communities in which I live, learn, and thrive.