An English House In Development

Greetings all, as I sit here and stare at my computer screen thinking about my high school writing experience, several things come to mind. I learned a lot, but not everything I learned I enjoyed and there are things I wished I had learned better.  

What first comes to mind is my freshman year of high school: the foundation of my writing career. It was in this year I learned lots of grammar and how to properly learned to write a paragraph. For writing paragraphs, what I learned was the complex deductive style; this meant the topic sentence came at the very beginning and had a number of major supports which had minor supports, followed by the concluding sentence. That was a nice start but this was the foundation, which meant there was more to come.

Sophomore year I took this knowledge of what I had gained as a freshman and expanded it to five paragraphs. This was the year of the five paragraph essay. It was a rocky start, but eventually I got the hang of things and my writing drastically improved. I was no longer completely dependent on my sister (who is an associate editor) and could begin to comfortably write papers on my own.

My junior and senior year my writing was like a mathematical constant; it never changed. Anytime my teachers gave out a writing assignment I automatically thought of the five paragraph essay format; it was instinctual at this point. I wrote (to what I believe) some very fantastic papers, but towards the end of my high school English career, I was getting bored. If you imagine my freshman year as the foundation to a house, and my sophomore year as the walls of the house being built, I equate my junior and senior year as a stagnated period where not much was accomplished, and all that is left is a near complete house. I learned a few useful tools as an upperclassman, but nothing as big and important as my first two years in high school.

This takes me to the current state of where I am with my writing. I can spit out a five paragraph essay without much difficulty, but that is boring, writing is more than that. It is a nice start, but there are more ways to write a paper than this format. I wish I had learned other ways to write papers, maybe in the style of a New York Times articles (granted, this is to a different audience, but it would still have been nice to learn how to write like this). I also wish I had learned how to use some different grammatical tools in my papers. Freshman year I learned about the colon, semicolon, etc., but I feel like I never fully learned how to utilize them in my writing.

I find myself wanting to expand what I know of writing. I do not have OCD by any means, but I hate having things left unfinished, and currently, I feel like this “house” I have been building is close to being finished, there are just some final tasks to be done. That is what I am hoping to accomplish with this English class. Judging by the title of the class, what I will be learning is how to write persuasively (I have deduced this from the word “rhetoric”). This is a crucial skill needed for anybody (especially for those individuals in business related careers) so I look forward to learning how to expand what I know of persuasive writing with this class. I also look forward to expanding what I know of writing and utilizing some new tools that will enable me to finish this “house” I have been working on since my freshman year of high school. I have concerns about writing long papers (what I consider long is anything more than 6 pages) and I’m sure there will be struggle involved (I usually only wrote papers three to five pages in length) but that is how growth happens. But I am at a Jesuit university, and that is one lesson that they stress: getting yourself out of your comfort zone and growing. I’m sure in this class, I will learn many useful skills that will help me communicate effectively/persuasively, but also help me finish this proverbial house I have been working on since my freshman year of high school.