As a Minor in Writing, I feel like I’m constantly being asked to evaluate myself as a writer. I’ve never had to do this much metawriting ever, and sometimes I wonder about the validity of my evaluations considering they feel so close in time together. I can describe this phenomenon as similar to how you never really see your physical changes on a day to day basis, but when you go home after a few months of not seeing your parents, they tell you if you’ve changed or not. The changes are subtle but, as I’ve come to learn, they make all the difference. It’s not the days in which we see change, but rather the months and years.
As a writer, I’m someone who is more critical of herself than ever, questioning my choice for why that comma needs to go there or what word works best from the many options I’ve drafted. At this point in my writing career, I’m not terrified of revisions as I was at the beginning of the term, where changing my precious prose made me feel guilty that I was doing something totally wrong the first go-around. If I thought I knew everything there is to know about writing, I was wrong. As I learn more writing tools from Stylish Academic Writing and many useful, crafty techniques in Mr. Barry’s class, I feel more active in the writing process by actively engaging these tools, rather than a passive writer who just writes fluidly without considering the many methods available to employ. It’s a liberating feeling taking the wheel on my writing. My voice reads louder off the page as I use what I’ve learned to make a point and join a conversation with my words.
These new writing tools effectively make me a stylish, successful writer. What a great adjective to describe myself, a writer, and with pomp. I’m a writer who loves to write still, despite the large amount that is required of me. This semester writing has become comparable to fulfilling an addiction I always thought I had but never really diagnosed it as such. The more I write the more I want to write.
Being surrounded by like-minded peers who also share a passion for writing has been extremely beneficial to my own practices. In class and through peer revisions I get to learn about what other students are working on and read their work, effectively giving them an immediate audience to write for outside of their original intended audience. Reading the work of my peers helps me with my own writing by picking up on techniques I might not get through a style guide or published author’s work. Like we discussed in class one time, undergraduate students have the freedom to experiment with and tinker with the rules of writing because the stakes and our reputations are not as important as a tenured professor or a published author, individuals with a lot more riding on what they say.
At first, I was hesitant as to what the Gateway course could add to my writing skills and style. Taking a class on “writing,” just seems a little odd because it’s not something that can be taught so much as it can be practiced. Someone may study Stylish Academic Writing from cover to cover 100 times over but not be able to put the lessons they’ve learned into practice and utility. I think one of the strengths I’ve developed this term is the ability to take something like a writing course and use it to refine areas of my writing that I need the most work.
For me, that means tackling my comma problem and run-on sentence problem. Through office hours with Mr. Barry, where I am required to read aloud my papers to check for flow and proper syntax, I have learned that sentences can cut off a lot earlier than I let them. While teaching us to vary sentence structures and lengths often, he used the analogy of a tennis player being good at shot selection. Good professional tennis players know when to shoot at the baseline or hit a shot thats closer to the net so that their opponent won’t have enough time to reach and return the ball. Good writers take that tennis lesson to heart by offering long and complex sentences mixed with the shorter ones.
In addition to this excellent advice, I’ve also shaken off my desire to sound “smart” with my writing. As my peers in Mr. Barry’s class and the Gateway course have pointed out, the more you try to sound smart, the more you’ll sound like you’re trying to hard. Now I know to write so that I can communicate. If I write clearly, my readers will appreciate it and enjoy it.
If you give a girl good writing to read, you’ll make her a writer for a day. Teach a girl to write well, you’ll make a writer for a lifetime.
SAME NOTES, DIFFERENT SONG: A WRITER'S LIFE
