My High School Writing Experience

High school was an important time in my life. It shaped me not only as a writer, but as a person too. I put forth a great deal of effort to develop myself as a student and it certainly paid off as I would not be here today if I hadn't. One of the things great about high school is that you get to see yourself physically and mentally develop. As a writer I could see major improvements over the course of my four years at high school. My vocabulary improved as did my sentence structure and attention to detail. This was due to practice, as most improvements are

. I easily wrote a few hundred papers in high school. Each one better than the last, for the most part. The thing I really enjoyed about my writing experience in was the variety of topics and prompts there were. I wrote everything from research papers, argumentative essays, rhetorical analysis papers, blog posts, complaint letters, to your basic persuasive essays. Having this range of papers under my belt will only benefit me for my writing endeavors here at SLU because I will have some background in this area. The bad part of my high school writing experience was the lack of help and tutoring offered by my school. If I needed help with my paper I had to seek it from my parents or siblings. While this was still beneficial to me, having a good writing center with experienced writers would have been much more helpful and convenient . None the less I still greatly developed as a writer in many ways. Some of the main aspects of writing that I learned in high school consisted of sentence structure, rhetorical writing, quote analysis, etc. I also did a big research paper my senior year in my Advanced Composition class. I read a book about the 9/11 attacks and how the terrorist groups developed in the years prior. I then developed a thesis from my readings and supported it with several research articles. In the end I spent about two months on this project, and my paper ended up being about 14 pages long. Going through that experience was miserable at times but I am glad I went through because it prepared me for the challenges in college that I am about to encounter.

Based on the title of this class I assume we will be doing work similar to what I did in high school. I am sure we will be incorporating our book into our writing which I have done many times. Also, I noticed that we will be working on rhetorical essays hence the title of the class. Fortunately, I did write one of those in the fall of my senior year and I am also quite proud of that paper. As for my concerns, I worry that the papers we will be assigned are going to be quite challenging and complex but fortunately we do have the incredibly convenient University Writing Services which I will definitely be taking advantage of. My only other concern that the UWS can't help me with is the reading quizzes. Depending on how difficult the read is these could be challenging but I have my fingers crosses that they are relatively straight forward. In the end, I know that my high school writing experiences have prepared me greatly for college and even though there will be obstacles that come my way I am excited to encounter them.