From a young age writing was never my forte. Coming from a different country and having to learn English as my second language, writing was what I struggled most with. As I grew up my writing was considered good, but I always had to work as little extra in order to get it there. In high school I had a lot of experience with writing but the type of writing I was doing was very limited and had to stick a very specific rubric under a set time for the AP exams. A lot of times this made my writing feel Ike it wasn’t mine and that I was just checking off boxes to complete what was asked of me. My first essay of college was completely different, I was asked to define terms in my sources that I knew about and learned multiple times in the past, but I had never really gotten to incorporate them into my writing. These were just words that I had to memorize for a vocabulary quiz and then push to the back of my mind. This was no longer the case in college. At first it was a little challenging and I found the terms burdensome and did not know how to include them into my writing. However, the more I did it the easier it got. It made me realize that I understood my writing better and wasn’t just putting words on a paper in order to have something. By using the terms to analyze sources I was forced to fully understand each topic I wrote about.
Additionally, I was able to come up with a method that suited me and made my writing easier to handle. My writing process consisted of breaking my essay into smaller portions so that every night I was able to work on it little by little. A specific example would be the document-based essay where every night I would take one of the sources and went through the literary terms. Before I knew it, this would become a paragraph and I would just repeat this process for every source. Along the way I also added more information that related to my topic and answered the question I was researching. By taking each source one by one and having the literary terms as a starting point it made essays so much easier to write. Often the hardest part was just sitting down to star writing the essay so, breaking it up into smaller portions made it so easier to. Through this process if I had any question, I would write them down and wait until I had my conference to ask about them. My goal was to have an almost final draft by the time the rough draft was due so that after my conference I would just have to revise my essay a little bit taking into consideration what was talked abut in my conference. Peer revision in class also was a way for my classmates to give me a new perspective on my writing by commenting what was missing or what did not flow smoothly.
I believe that when writing the literary terms all have a purpose. Personally, the ones that had a big impact in my writing were purpose, medium and diction. Purpose is what the author intended to communicate and with any piece of writing, I believe, this is the main driving force. When thinking about purpose I ask to myself what did the author want to get across the paper and why are they doing it. Medium how the source or writing was found. Examples of this would be online, or a newspaper. I believe this is important because depending where you find your source it could influence how accurate or how trustworthy the information is. Lastly, I think diction can have such an impact in someone’s writing and can be more than just words put together. Adding small things like alliteration can change a piece and make more sophisticated.
My journey of writing and my theory is nowhere near complete but I know that the changes I made this year are going to stay with me for the rest of college. I hope that just like I progressed this year, the best couple do years will bring experience that will help me grow as a writer. Maybe by next year my theory of writing will be completely different just like this year changed it from high school.
