Essay on How I Learnt to Write

Before my senior English CP class I had never wrote a paper. My high school career was filled with failures in class having never tried I just wanted to float on by and do as little as possible to pass. This was my frame of mind until the end of my junior year when i received my ACT scores I exceeded everyone's prediction. I knew i had a chance to do what no person in my family has done before and go to college but i still had to pass senior year and the mountain of classes i needed to take in order to prepare for college this included the hardest class i have ever taken Dr. Smiths English CP but i was up for challenge to prove myself and my ability to succeed the only thing standing in my way were three papers. That year i threw myself in the deep end and when I surfaced I knew how to write a decent paper.

The first day of class we Started reading macbeth by william shakespeare and at the end of the first day he told us that in two weeks we needed to turn in a paper that paired aristotle's criteria for a tragedy along with the fall of macbeth I had no idea what to do i went home that day and i felt defeated how can someone who has barely passed the easiest english classes make a coherent paper pairing two subjects i knew nothing about. Luckily this was supposed to happen over the next week Dr.Smith prepared all of us by going over source material and practice outlines giving my class a solid foundation for a paper to build and expand upon in theory however I had no experience in writing or typing i had to implement everything i had been taught four days before the paper was due i asked my teacher what i should do Dr. Smith just simply said think. That one word wormed around my head all day and night. it was pure genius one word to describe writing at its core thoughts on a page for a audience other my own conscience. I made a eight six on my first paper by just thinking about what to type and making correlations in text.

The next Hurdle came with new challenges but also new insight. This paper was on the same play instead of writing about tragedy and the fall of Macbeth i would write about the change of guilt he experienced throughout the play using the techniques i had acquired in the first paper i was confident i could shorten the time frame the writing would take and do it the night before the class this since most of my time i foolishly thought should be devoted to watching game film and preparing for the next football game i was dead wrong you cannot write a good paper the night before a deadline. Time management subsequently became the challenge of my writing ability and still affects my writing today however not to the extent that it has in the past

I made a horrible grade on that paper not only did i not completely the subject or how it related to the text i waited to the last minute to write it looking back on my decision i realized i do not even remember the team we faced that week but i remember and still feel outrage because of my lack of focus on the important tasks and indulging in a unrelated extracurricular activity. The two lessons I learned from that were failure is sometimes is more important than success and secondly i am student first athlete second prioritization is a key to life and writing. These lessons have helped form who i am as a student and person.

Finally Towards the end of my senior year of capstone project was a five page research project over an approved topic. The topic i chose was Erwin Rommel a brilliant german officer who fought in world war one and world war Two. This project is the hardest one i have undertaken. We had to acquire all sources and compile it together into a paper with no class outlines no premade thesis we had to follow. It was all of our own making.

I was scared not because i might fail but i felt that if i didn't do well i would disappoint my teacher which was worse than anything. After coming to terms with the challenge at hand I read Three books over the topic compiled quotes and examples of Erwin Rommel's brilliance on the battlefield after this i made a extensive outline i was prepared for the first time when i started the rough draft a week before the due date I just typed thoughts to the page with little to no hesitation i fell in love i had never been so proud of any work before that and was ecstatic to put my name on it. The last lesson in writing i would learn when i received my paper back a month later.

The last lesson was do not rush and to take your time proofread everything no matter how confident you are in the subject matter because if the grammar and spelling is wrong then the paper is wrong i rushed the paper and subsequently received low marks in these areas I failed the paper but i did not fail the teacher he was proud of the content i provided. These four lessons have helped me not only be a better writer but a better person as I stated before. I started the year with little to no writing experience and i ended up with knowledge that will I carry with me throughout life. Few things have influenced me more in life and writing than Dr. Smith and the lessons he taught me in those short eight months of my senior year. He pushed me to my academic limits challenging me everyday and he is the sole reason i can write today.