Week_1_1/14/16_Writing Experience Thus Far

Since I took my first dedicated writing class at the age of 11, I have struggled with the subject.  Throughout my middle school, high school, and college career I've learned many different writing styles and information on the subject.  The majority of my classes on writing have been focused on past personal experiences and ideas of your own, such as expository writing or creative writing.  In these classes, I learned how to turn memories and ideas into written text deemed interesting by others.  

Though I struggle with the subject, there are certain aspects I enjoy and understand.  I love the very structured format of certain types of writing, and how the writing process can be broken down into very manageable, compartmentalized sections.  Because I prefer to think and work in black and white, this structured aspect works well for me, whereas the interpretive 'grey areas' get me stuck.  Although any writer over the age of about 12 would think this style of writing is laughable, my most positive experience in writing classes has been when given a outline to build our paper with.  The organized, planned-out way of writing these paper made much more sense to me than just diving in.  Whereas when given very loosely outlined prompts that require the writer to get creative with their writing have been my most negative experiences.

This structure/outline I learned long ago has helped me in writing papers since.  It seems very elementary to be writing papers this way, but the idea of being able to have a rough outline to follow when writing makes the writing process much more enjoyable for me.

Every writing class I've taken started off with small exercises, meant to prepare and educate you on the particular writing style.  This was followed by increasingly larger assignments until the last paper was the longest and most detailed. This process makes sense- generalizing the type of writing until the students' mastery of the subject was  proficient enough to write a full paper using it.  I like this structure, but I always felt lost at the point in which early assignments using very understandable prompts became the larger, more interpretive ones.

My college writing experience has been almost the exact same as my high school experience.  I went to a more difficult high school and felt I was sufficiently prepared for what to expect in college.   At my last school, I took an expository writing class.  In this course, we wrote about memories and opinions.  This class was very similar to a class I took in high school.  

So far, I have yet to have a class on rhetorical writing, and am not at all educated on the subject.  I have written persuasive papers before, but I have never learned about rhetoric in general.  I am very excited to learn more about rhetoric because I have a very big interest in the art of argument and persuasion.  I can imagine that this subject will be my favorite writing class so far as it's the first one to have a subject I enjoy and am interested in.