Writing. Ew.

My high school writing experience was quite the roller coaster. Coming from a pretty prestigious grade school, I entered high school feeling confident about my writing abilities. Writing was never an activity that I particularly enjoyed though… I actually hated it. I hated having to come up with some sort of creative idea to write an ENTIRE paper on. I hated having to then take that idea in my head and somehow transfer that to paper for someone else to try to understand. I hated how long the papers took to write, and how from teacher to teacher expectations for these papers changed. 

I coasted through both freshman and sophomore English classes. I would rarely read the books, put minimal effort into writing my papers, and then somehow end up with an A. I was pretty comfortable with that arrangement. Then Junior year came…. During junior year, one single man changed my whole mindset on writing. Mr. Gaia. He was a new teacher, and was pretty tough guy. He was for sure a hard ass. After day 1 of his class, I knew that my comfortable writing process was about to be flipped completely upside down. 

I spent junior year really growing as a writer. I would actually read the books for class. I was able to appreciate the literature,and I would hunt through the books to try to find a topic that I was excited to write about. I would come up with these ideas that I was super excited about, I would tell Mr. Gaia, and he would immediately shut down my idea. “Your idea is a good one for an average writer, you’re way beyond that level. How about you try to write about this…?” His ideas were always 4384924890248 times harder than the one I had originally picked for myself. I was forced to challenge myself more than I thought I could possibly handle. Through this, I was able to grow as a writer. I was able to write papers that were extremely creative, and I was able to effectively present my point, and find strong evidence to support that point. I will be forever thankful for Mr. Gaia’s help in discovering my writing talent. 

From the title of this class, I am expecting to really nail down the skills of research, and writing convincing research papers. I am nervous about all of that. I know from high school how much effort goes into research papers, but I also know how proud I always am of the final product. I also know that my writing is going to be held to a higher standard. This is college, not high school. I’m ready to take this on, and I’m ready to grow in my writing abilities even more.