A Writer’s Awakening

After thinking back about my high school essays, I realized that they were all the same boring formal-informative format. My high school teachers taught me the strict introduction-body-conclusion format with a stress on including a thesis statement. It was engrained into my head that this was the correct and most professional structure. However, in this class, I was exposed to many different styles of writing. I was challenged to experiment with new types of writing that I had never even attempted in the past. It has astonished me how all this exposure has helped me to develop as a writer and build an incredible amount of confidence that I never thought I would be able to attain.

As strange as it may sound, I feel that the most valuable lesson we had in this class was learning how to free write. Free writing is simple; all a writer must do is write down their thoughts on a particular subject or subjects and continue doing this for a certain amount of time without stopping. In the past, I would have thought of this type of writing as silly and useless. However, I have realized that this writing teaches many valuable skills which I have applied to several papers already. Free writing has greatly enhanced my creativity while writing and has encouraged me to focus on portraying my valuable ideas in an initial rough draft. After transferring all of my ideas onto a paper in front of me, I can then go back and restructure sentences and paragraphs to make it flow smoothly. After applying this technique to my other papers in this class and in other classes, writing comes more naturally to me now and causes much less stress. Removing most of the stress from writing has allowed me to enjoy writing, which I never even dreamed could have happened for me.

The most fun I have ever had writing a paper was when I wrote my Narrative Sketch paper. In this paper, I tried something I had never tried before. I abstained from the strict informative essay...