How I Feel About Being a Writer

Believe it or not, the main reason I choose this class was because my guidance counselor suggested that I take a writing course the second semester since I choose a literature course for the first half of the year. If it was up to me and I did not take my guidance counselor’s advice, I probably would not be in this class and I would be taking another literature class instead. I like reading a lot more than I do writing and I would have been just as happy if I had taken another literature course this semester. However, my guidance counselor convinced me to take this class because she said it would be helpful in preparing me to write college essays. I decided that she had a good point and that learning how to write a little better could not hurt me. I find it strange because I do not really consider myself a great writer, however, many of my teachers, especially my AP American teacher, say that I am a very good writer. When I hear other kids’ essays read aloud, they always seem to be so much more complex and rich in vocabulary than mine and I always wonder how I can get better the same or better grades than them. I also find that I am generally better at writing research papers and informational papers than papers about myself and my experiences. Unfortunately, it seems like most of the papers we write in this class are going to be about myself and my experiences so I will have to get better at writing those.

The main thing I hope to get out of this class is to become a better writer in general, but also a better writer about topics that are about myself and my experiences. I think that this will help my greatly while I apply for colleges as well as during college and even after that. Although I may not necessarily like writing all that much, I do realize that it is a very essential skill to have and the better I am at it, the further and the more I can do in life. I was also never really into proofreading and going over my essays and I certainly never wrote any drafts of my papers. I always found that it was easier to just write and then edit the original as opposed to brainstorming and then creating a rough draft like we were taught to do back in elementary school. When we first learned about the writing process, brainstorming, and drafting back when I was younger I remember how I always thought that it was pointless and a huge waste of time. I think that this is my biggest weakness as a writer. I just find it so inefficient and time consuming to be going back all the time and making all these corrections and changing everything around. Like I said before, another one of my weaknesses is that I really do not enjoy writing about my experiences, mainly because I find it much more difficult to write about my past experiences than I do to write about something that I know a lot about, such as American History or Biology. I think that the best papers I have written have been research papers, such as my research paper on Pharmacogenomics in ninth grade Biology and my paper on the French Revolution last year in AP European History. In general, I usually do better on these types of papers than I do on papers for English class.

Overall, I think I am a good writer but I can definitely improve in some areas. I can definitely work on writing about myself and also proofreading and revising my writing.  I hope that during the course of this semester I will able to improve in these areas and really fine tune my writing skills and become a better writer.