Week 1_1/15/16_Past_Writing_Experiences

In all my year of high school all of my English classes consisted of readings done prior to class of a chosen novel, discussion of the novel in class with classmates, and then usually a one page paper due next class discussing the themes in the novel or our viewpoint on a given prompt. But the difference is that our school required us to construct a paper according to an acronym constructed by our school board “IT’s Clear”, which when broken apart and defined, it stood for the basic buildup of a normal paragraph, from the intro and topic sentence to the argument and conclusion. This acronym is what basically all my high school teachers from any other subject also required us to do when we had to write any sort of paper. From explaining the underlying motifs and themes in novels, to explaining why Japan felt the need to attack the United States of America during World War 2. 

In hindsight I was fine with this type of paper writing and format mainly because it was short, simple, and very efficient to get my argument across. But despite this streamline routine of writing I still have issues with my writing. It has proven rather difficult for me to be able to stretch an argument bigger than a page or a half because that is all that was ever required of me, which has started to make me wonder whether or not this way of writing has turned me into a mediocre student in the eyes of academia. Along with that, I am a very scattered brain individual, so my writing sometimes seems sporadic or sometimes messy, or I become blocked on a subject and I don’t know what to do.  Furthermore, I’m concerned with the fact that I may one day have to write a research paper, which I haven’t done at all from my high school years or my college years, but I hope it is somewhat similar to writing argumentative papers. Lastly, English isn’t one of my best subjects, since my organization and readability has always been messy. 

Nevertheless this formula for writing has proved to be very helpful with most of my college writing, mainly because all the writing has been very similar to what I did in high school, constructing arguments that are backed up by evidence. From my statistic class to my psychology class, all my papers have been utilizing the similar strategy of my school’s mundane “It’s Clear” strategy of having a hypothesis and defending it with facts and evidence, in order to build a strong argument. So I feel that my high school level writing courses have been pretty effective so far in my college career. 

So far I haven’t taken any English courses in College, if you don’t count philosophy as a type or English class or my statistics class which required me to write numerous papers about how the world is shaped around statistics. So I'm feeling very nervous when it comes to this course. But with the little amount of confidence I have in my past writing experiences I feel that I can hold my weight in this class.