When I first got my schedule together and was getting ready for college, I wasn’t too happy to see a writing on the schedule. To be honest I was not looking forward to more English after 4 years of high school. It was a class I really excelled in and Some of my most hated things about high school were related to it. A great example of this frustration are the books Anthem by Ayn Rand and Feed by M.T. Anderson. I hated these books to no end just every element of the books infuriated me. These are probably negative emotions I’ve had about high school. I’m open to reading basically anything for a class, but they give me headaches. The last year of high school English was just getting out of here and in the marine labs. So when I started I have told myself that “I know I might not enjoy this, but it’s a necessary part of my college curriculum and if I didn’t want to do it again I would have to do well”. This led to me just going into college English saying college is a new day maybe will be a new day for me and my relationship English. Once we got started on the slow dismantlement of my high school Writing experience, I think that’s when I really begin to enjoy the class. While some assignment would aggravate me and sometimes just not resonate with me, I would still enjoy most of the class. Certain things have found difficult to unlearn Is what I wouldn’t call perfectionism but focus on the ideas I was talking about and not the technique I was using. I write about this problem in a 10 Minute Writing on November 14, 2018 “I keep running into a kind of writer’s block. It’s hard for me to think of ideas for the paper. I can write but it’s difficult to do so. My sources are a bit of a problem too. It’s is difficult to work them in without it sounding cringe.” You can see the active distress I am having as I try and focus on the idea instead of the technique. It was terrible because I wouldn’t get anything done and I will get better at what I was supposed to be getting better at. I got frustrated and eventually talk to Professor Drown any recommended the current strategy. By the next Entry (November 19, 2018) it seems to be working “The focus on technique has been really beneficial for my writing process. I have found it to write about the thing I like to be difficult. This is because of my care for the topic make it hard to accept low quality work and focus on technique.” Even with all the progress I’ve made I have a lot to go. A lot of the old rules of high school are still rattling around in my head.
The Pollan-Singer paper was interesting I believe it was my first real college essay which is amazing. It almost seems we came out of nowhere and the short amount of time I had worked on it was surprising to me. It was probably my first time writing in such a volume since writing my college essay. In writing the essay I had some strong Opinions about the murder, but by reading the animal’s place article give me some perspective on the issue. Singer brought up some good points it’s not just the usual vegan screaming, yelling, and lack of understanding of biology. I was interested in writing the paper, but I ran into the problem of my high school mindset with this paper hard. I made a massive text block of cheese raw ideas expecting that I would have plenty of time to nice tasting broth of an essay. Not realizing you would be due within 3 days of my first edited. Thank God this class is my grade on the quality of thought. It taught me a lot about deadlines and how to work within a college schedule. It also shows me what kind of work did they would be expecting. The one thing I found continuous throughout the papers that I kind of just uses a way to vent on the matter. This is probably why I found it easy to write about unlike the Owens in the Park. The paper really presented me with a lot of problems. Integrating techniques was something I was having trouble with him this, but it wasn’t helped by the morally complex nature of the paper. By the end of it, I found it credibly annoying. Well, the paper was written well I found it incredibly repetitive as it seemed most of it was devoted to the Owens hopping around Africa. To be entirely honest I never finished reading the entire packet Because of this. Later while writing the paper I would quote mine the Later parts of the paper and look for things had supported the point I’d come to with about a quarter of the knowledge of the situation. Constantly I would keep playing off my lack of knowledge of keys event pretending to forget about them in the mire of college work. In the process fooling no one and hurting my ability to produce quality work. On top of that, I found it kind of annoying for quote integration. Am I found it difficult to work quote in at a level that properly incorporated them into the already existing paragraph? This would cause a lot of times where I’m just rewriting entire paragraphs to fit in one quote. Other kinds of technical writing skills were finding their ways into my essays but just not at the rate would say showed up and see your skill doing it. But that’s nothing compared to the one I had so much issue with Is Civilization worth all the trouble. This one was a special blend of caring about the topic, not like some of the source I use, poor technical execution, and, systemic writer’s block. Well, I’d like the initial concept of the whole to explore through reading. I think it really messed with me too. It spread me up to all these different concepts. Infant mortality rates in the 19 century, life expectancy the Islamic Golden Age, and, Ironworking in the 15th century. I think also on the problems as I didn’t take the creative reading as seriously as a should since I do it so much. “I pretty sure that I have done creative reading many times. Probably most of it on Wikipedia. It starts with reading one article on something I need to look up, but soon I 15 different tabs open to different Wikipedia articles…” (Let’s write Nov 5, 2018). I do think there was a bit of growth, but sometimes I don’t feel like you were worth what I went through to write that.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned this year Is persistence especially with learning things. If I keep working on things and keep focusing, I will eventually succeed. No matter how hard it gets I can do it, HOPEFUL. One thing I must get on is updating my logs and portfolios. A lot of the time I did work and lost credit because I couldn’t take 5 seconds and posted. I remember spending Sunday nights on essays just trying to get them finished. Waking up in the morning to be told that I did post my essay, so I would be behind on the work we were doing. Perpetuating a cycle where I always have something that should be in but that’s not in. On a lighter note, one thing I have gotten better at is annotations and reading. I never liked it annotations because of how I perceive them they thought they need to be like a complex statement on the topic of the paper. I never thought that they could just be random stuff I thought about while reading the paper. This opens a whole new world a possibility when reading stuff, I never had to stop and really think about its annotations. This revelation happens around the time I was reading the Owens paper. Really help me for the rest of the year. One thing I could say is that I never really found a way to directly use the annotations in my writing, but they help me think it out a lot more. One thing I did improve in writing is the technology it’s not such a foreign concept of now. I can set up rudiment type of voice marker and quote sandwiches. I’ve heard a lot about writing in this 15-week course. But still, have a lot to learn. One thing is how to just write. Sounds like a weird problem because I’m doing that right now, but sometimes into a random stop in my writing process which hold me back from getting really getting into a flow of productivity. It is a seemingly small problem, but it really stops me from to the level of work that should be expected of me. It’s because I’m either filled with indecision and at a loss of words for what I should write. And it’s this bad habit that I need to get rid of it works to really grow as a writer. I’m optimistic about the future though.
