Your journal entry should describe what you believe the act of writing to be or do based on your experience.
Your entry should also discuss how you “learned” to write. As you think about what is central to “writing,” when/how did you learn this?
Finally, your journal entry should reflect on how your understanding of writing matches up with “writing” as the course has presented it so far.
Writing is essential to the human experience. Writing is not only for the creator, but the viewer. Written works allow readers to be educated, entertained and persuaded. Writing is a medium for creativity, reflection on thoughts and feelings, communication, and documentation for historical or personal purposes.
I remember the diaries I used to keep as a kid, and reading them now I not only get to step into the mind of an overdramatic 9 year old from Minnesota, I get to witness how much I’ve grown as a person. Growing up, I enjoyed writing in my free time. I used it to express my own personal struggles (something most of us can relate to) and I recall filling up pages of my sparkly purple diary (with a matching pen) without even realizing it. This was so easy because it was soley for me and I knew I was free from judgement or criticism. I was comforted in knowing that no one would ever see that I spelled words wrong or made grammatical errors - or worse, someone knowing how much I hated a girl named Saylor from my 3rd grade glass.
Academically, I dreaded when teachers required you write about things you dont even care about. I always hated it, simply because I didn’t feel passionate enough about some middle aged white man who wrote a novel about something irrelevant. If you are familiar with Catcher in the Rye, (critically acclaimed as “one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century,” according to the Modern Library) it glorifies the struggles of a man boy who never matures. From a theme analysis done by litcharts.com, “Holden’s romantic and sexual expectations reveal his tendency to idealize certain unrealistic notions.” We were forced to elaborate on his struggles- as if he truly was a minority. This is an example of something I have zero motivation to elaborate on. I believe writing is most effective when it is about something you are passionate about or when a prompt is vague enough to let you think on your own without any harsh boarders restricting you.
With this hate for writing in an educational setting, I struggled to beat my own perfectionism, knowing that what I submit will be graded and analyzed. I would drown in the expectation that I would type up a perfectly good essay in one go. I now know this expectation is inefficient. I didn’t realize writing has to start with breaking it down into parts, a process that I now use. I start by brainstorming and answering each prompt question, then doing a rough draft to compartmentalize it. This is similar to the “writing process” that the courses presents. Starting with intervention, where we brainstorm what we want to write. Planning, where we figure out how we want to structure the written work. Drafting, where we physically write. Revision, where we read over and reflect on what we have written. And finally, editing, where we might need to change grammatical or stylistic errors. This process reiterates that writing is recursive, and neglect to use this process leads us to ineffective writing- something I had been doing for a long time. Overall, the point of writing is so viewers may gain something from it. I want readers to enjoy my writing, and I want to be proud of my work when I read it myself.
Comments