Journal 3: How I learned to Write

Original journal (revised):

I have been learning how to write since I was little, but I had not really started to organize my writing process until recently. Until I reached high school English, I was a horrible writer. I retained few of the grammar rules, and I had to relearn almost everything each school year. Eventually, I got tired of feeling like an idiot and decided that I wanted to learn how to write more effectively, analytically, and skillfully. Once I started caring and trying harder, I found that English wasn't as bad as I had thought it was. The first exercise that helped me was watching the Standard Deviants' videos on grammar. My siblings have also helped me by pointing out bad grammar when I noticed none, and sometimes telling me how it could be written better. Also, writing speeches for 4-H that have to be 5-8 minutes or longer have helped me learn to connect my points and make them flow. Sometimes reading my speech out loud over and over again helped more than reading it, simply because it sounded more awkward to say a line than to read it.

I still don't have much experience writing papers, but I have always loved to read and participate in the Everett Public Library's reading program for as long as I can remember. Through the reading, I have expanded my knowledge and discovered writing styles I felt to be choppy, styles that were descriptive and styles that made the book come to life.
I feel that all of these have helped me as well as what I have learned so far in English 98 and I am excited to see what happens when we start writing our first essay.


Additions during final week of the quarter:

During the first two weeks of class, I wrote my Inventory of Being, my first two summaries, and my first five journals. We also read and did exercises on these statements, paragraph coherence, the writing process, and transitional words. All of these assignments worked together to help me with writing my first essay. To do the essay well, I had to apply all the concepts I had learned to my own writing. This is the real challenge. It is easy enough to correct one or two types of mistake in a homework exercise, but in their own writing, a person has to look for many mistakes at once.

Something that unexpectedly helped my writing were journals. The journals I wrote were ten minute free writing exercises that my professor assigned. At first I was reluctant to do them because I felt they would be a waste of my time and boring. However, I started to enjoy them, and they were not a waste of my time. At first my journals were pretty short or a little off topic and I had quite a few moments of sitting there trying to think of something to write. Eventually, I improved and I was able to write for almost the entire time and stay focused on the subject. I applied this skill when writing my essays by typing in what came to my mind even if it didn't sound right. It was usually good information that, before writing journals, I wouldn't have written down because I couldn't complete my thought about it, but what I did write down from those moments usually made it into my final essays.

The largest challenge I had throughout all three of my essays, was coming up with a good thesis statement, strong supporting topic sentences, and organized paragraphs. I think the skills I have gained in developing all three of these are the most important skills that I will take away from this class because I will use them the most often in the future.