Reflecting on My Writing

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When I am assigned to write an essay, the first thing I do is panic. I panic because I always seem to run into the same problems with my writing process. I have no central idea. I have no clue what I actually want to write about. When I was younger, I always started by making a web or an outline because thats what my teachers encouraged me to do in school, but I don’t do that anymore. Now I sit in front of my laptop, I take a deep breath, close my eyes, gather my thoughts, and type. I just let my thoughts flow onto the page. When I don’t feel the pressure of writing to an audience, my writing is completely different than it is when I am writing something that I know my professor or peers will read. As I am writing this exact sentence, I don’t quite know where I am going with it. My writing process is unorthodox and unorganized, but it is what I do everytime. When I stop trying to follow the linear model of writing, explained by Nancy Sommers as the process of forming an idea, writing about it, then revising afterwards, I feel that I am more capable of discovering something meaningful within my words. When I am forced to write a thesis statement and base my paper solely on it, it doesn’t come out as good as I think it should. It decreases the potential for my ideas to grow and discoveries to be made. It limits me to a single statement and narrows my thoughts, preventing me from discovery.

When it comes to revision, I am very lazy and I lack the drive to change my paper drastically. I do exactly what Nancy Sommers, author of the article “Revision Strategies of Student-Writers and Experienced-Writers,” says not to do; I become attached to what I have written. The thought of starting new and throwing out what I have already written ...

... middle of paper ...

...have to discover it.
We wrote an essay in class where we had to ponder the age old act of storytelling and why people do it. When I wrote my first draft for that paper, I was so confused. I had no clue why people told stories. I knew what people had said their personal reasons were, but I didn’t know how to incorporate that information with my own personal feelings about stories. It wasn’t until after the second set of peer reviews that I realized that just taking their comments, which there weren’t many of, into consideration, I needed to follow my own gut feelings about my paper; my felt sense. I felt like something was very wrong with it, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. If I were a more experienced writer, perhaps I would have kept writing, not until I had filled the required amount of pages, but until I had found the words that I was searching for.

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