Why Writing Is so Difficult Essay Example

Writing is difficult for many students. This was true for me too, but I have learned that it is not as difficult as it seems. I learned from my high school teachers that I needed to be more creative with my transitions, be more objective, and use the constructive feedback given to me to fix my essays. Furthermore, I had also been given feedback that I needed better sentence structure. Focusing on this content also helped me improve the way I wrote essays. Constructive feedback back from teachers is the most outstanding way to learn how to write essays.

My essay writing was atrocious my freshman year in high school. I was not objective, I didn’t have great sentence structure, and I didn’t use very many transition words. Fast forward to my junior year of high school, writing the essays that year were a struggle at first. This year of English class turned out to be the best year for me, for writing and showed me that writing is not all that outrageously difficult to do. My teacher, Mrs. Calder, showed me the way of writing good essays by being objective, using good sentence structure, using transitions words, and even using higher vocabulary to be more descriptive to get my point across in my essays.

It was the beginning of my junior year of high school. Mrs. Calder was a very relaxed teacher, which made her easy to write essays for because I was not stressed when writing them. It was a hot sunny day in the computer lab and everyone was editing and writing essays on the book we had just finished reading, The Great Gatsby, my prompt was to write about whether or not the characters in The Great Gatsby either changed substantially or did not change at all. As I finished my essay I looked it over, I then called Mrs. Calder over to come and read it before I turned in the draft. She then told me “pick one paragraph for me to read”. I chose a paragraph, she reads it and says, “this paragraph need to be more objective”. An example of what I needed to fix from my essay on The Great Gatsby is “Daisy thinks she wants to be with Gatsby; then she thinks she does not want to be with Gatsby” (Dow). The more objective and corrected sentence read, “Daisy wants to be with Gatsby; then does not want to be with Gatsby” (Dow), I then looked to see if there are any more errors like it. I fixed other errors like it, then I called my teacher over for a second time and she found that there was a lack of creativity and professionalism in my transitions. She gave me examples of what words that I could use to make my transitions more interesting to read. I took the information I had been educated on to good use and changed the transitions in my essay to be more creative and fascinating to read. In my essay about The Great Gatsby the transition started out similar to “In the novel The Great Gatsby, Daisy changes” (Dow), I then changed to the statement previously stated “Daisy wants to be with Gatsby; then does not want to be with Gatsby” (Dow). The information that I learned helped earn higher grades in my Junior English class.

Learning to write essays well was important because I had gained important knowledge from my mistakes, in the literacy narrative The Importance of Writing Badly the concept of learning from your mistakes is an important part of writing. I feel connected to The Importance of Writing Badly because I too wrote badly. In The Importance of Writing Badly Bruce Ballenger says “Most of us have lurking in our past some high priest of good grammar whose angry scribbling occupied the margins of our papers” (Ballenger). I have always had teachers mark my papers in the rough draft scribbling all over the pages for bad grammar, over what content I had in the paper. Additionally, this made me feel discouraged about writing. When I was able to focus on content and how to make my papers better to read I was able to feel more confident about writing my essays.

Furthermore, I was mediocre at writing and had been getting “B” grades in my English classes. At the end of the trimester for this class I was getting “A” grades in English because I had learned the information to be capable to write essays very well. I learned that listening to constructive feedback from a teacher is the best way to learn how to write essays.