Continued Blog Post

Old Blog Post

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. 

Continued Blog Post

I am going to continue on this reflection more on the college side of things. I had a lot of concerns going from high school writing to college writing. I knew the expectations from college English professors were going to much higher than those of high school English teachers. Boy was I right… I had thought some of my high school teachers had been tough on me, but Mr. Strickland, you definitely win. The expectations in this class are incredibly higher than those of high school. The research, the level of writing, the writing devices, the paradigms. Everything is different. I would say it is good different though. Yes, classes that are easier I probably would like better. I wouldn’t learn anything though.

 I have learned so much in this class this far. I know my research skills have become a million times better, and I have learned the BEST ways to find information pertinent to whatever I am writing about. I also have become exponentially better at arguing. Through fight club, I have learned the best way to come up with a strong argument with strong supporting points. I have also learned how to portray this viewpoints effectively. I have learned that being firm is important, but it is also important to not come off as too aggressive. I know this is a skill that I will use in writing throughout my college career, but this type of argument can be used in every day life. I really feel like this class has given me a strong base to build on throughout my college writing career, and has given me all the tools necessary to help succeed in these classes.