Four Essays That Prove I Suck: The Arguments of a Pacifist

I started off the semester thinking I was one of the best writers out there. I scored higher than most on the English portion of the ACT and even passed EH 101 with a ninety-nine, yet EH 102 was like a punch straight to my pride. Always the pacifist, I preferred my arguments to be snide comments under my breath instead of a series of well thought out opinions on paper. Even worse, I had always struggled with avoiding work instead of actually doing it. When EH 102 promised to teach me how to use rhetorical knowledge appropriately, think critically about all kinds situations, maintain a general writing process while creating and editing an essay, use knowledge of conventions to write to different audiences using different genres, and still incorporate myself into my writing, I thought “way too easy”. That was my first mistake: underestimating the difficulty of the course. This semester had really forced me to make a change in my writing and helped me to better understand how to organize my thoughts.

It’s almost laughable to remember my expression after being handed back my first essay. A ninety-two should have made me proud, but compared to my EH 101 grades that ninety-two was the lowest grade I’d received in a college-level English class. It wasn’t like I had really put a lot of effort into my first essay though. It was a quick paper with a subject I’d picked off a list of “college essay topics”. My grammar was lacking and my ideas were subpar written in sentences that were underdeveloped, “Starting the week before a major exam, students go through a cramming period where we try to remember everything the professor said since the class started”. That sentence could use better organization, different vocabulary, and less...

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...take, but those things happen and I had to suffer the consequences.

I’m not going to say that I didn’t learn in this class because I did. I learned how to correctly organize my thoughts into good arguments with fact to back them up. I learned how to change my tone when I speak to different audiences. Still, I don’t think this semester was as much about me learning, as me accepting that fact that I’m not the greatest writer in the world. I can get better and there are many areas in which I need to improve even now. My critical thinking is still lacking because I don’t bother to think past the most obvious ideas. My writing is a constant struggle between where procrastination and struggling to form and understand my own opinions. I know how a better understanding of my weaknesses and can use what I have learned this semester to make up for my writing flaws.