My Writing Experiences: The Good and the Bad

Throughout my many years in school, it has always been a requirement to create and submit written works of various types. In High School, the curriculum focused particularly on the development of students’ essay writing skills, as well as their ability to conduct research and document genuine sources accordingly. I always enjoyed and excelled in writing narratives and other creative works, but the same could not always be said for long academic papers. My greatest writing experience occurred when writing poetry and short newspaper articles, and my worst occurred while writing my senior exhibition research paper.

Before the 11^th grade I had always despised English class and all of its components. I always seemed to have intensely nit-picky teachers that enforced the use of proper English, and English class usually entailed studying extensive lists of vocabulary words as well as reading an array of banal literature. But junior year I had a teacher that was extremely passionate for the subject—and soon after, extended her love for literature and poetry to me. During her class, I discovered that I had an aptitude for writing poetry—particularly free verse. From then on I started writing poems in my free time, often channeling my negative emotions into them. It has been a common theme in my life that I have grown to love academic subjects only through the influence of great teachers; teachers that have a passion for the subject, care for the students and their academic progress, and teach the subject in an active and interesting manner. Taking 11^th grade English was my most positive writing experience because I had a very inspirational teacher and discovered a love for poetry.

During my senior year in high school I decided to undertake a very serious subject for my senior exhibition project. It required not only months of painstaking scientific research, but also a physical implementation of an experiment. The topic I had chosen was Biochar, a new development in the field of alternative agriculture and science as a whole. The project was especially problematic because there was very little research available to back up my paper, and the scale of the experiment was essentially too large for any person to conduct on their own. Although in the end I did well on both the product and paper, the process was long and problematic—I lost nights of sleep trying to salvage my experiment and new problems would consistently surface. Although my research project was definitely my worst writing experience, it gave me valuable research skills in preparation for college, and I am ultimately proud that I was able to achieve my goals for the project.

Academic writing was never really my forte, yet I was well prepared to write long analytical essays in college. The ability to write will also prove to be essential in the real world—whether it be to compose write-ups, reports, proposals, or even emails. Therefore, a good English grounding is important, and any good English teacher will tell you that a good argument requires a good thesis and sufficient evidence to back it up.