I don’t think I have ever disliked writing. What I do remember is floating along through high school and my freshman year of college without significant writing challenges or epiphanies. I remember receiving unhelpful “good job” peer reviews while dishing out detailed feedback to unenthusiastic recipients. In my senior year of high school I took AP Literature from Mrs. Wiegand, and even though she placed some emphasis on writing, the main focus of the class was literary analysis. My writing had to be just good enough that it didn’t distract from the ideas that I was trying to communicate.

The only times that I consistently wrote out of class were in a dream journal I have been compiling for the past few years (it’s about fifty pages long, now). The point of the dream journal is to get the most vivid images and feelings on the page, so while this may have helped me strengthen my narrative writing, it probably did not help me improve my writing in other ways. Last year—my freshman year here at UW—my stereotypically “right-brain” classes included a class on Literature from 1700-1900 (I was a freshman and didn’t get much choice in my classes, but it wasn’t so bad), and a class on ancient Greek novels. Not once did my required paper length exceed five pages and not once was my writing given critical feedback. This isn’t wholly surprising, since it was the ideas that mattered, but it meant stagnation for my writing.

So throughout those years, I swung between an informal tone like this one and a dry-as-dust tone that was difficult to put life into. I hadn’t considered writing for an audience, because that audience was always either me or my teachers. I indiscriminately used Easybib, did only two essays with proper MLA citations in my life, and wrote either disorganized, stream-of-consciousness essays or rigidly-structured 5-paragraph ones. Then, because of last quarter, I had a bad case of "science brain" from my chemistry and physics classes, and I hadn't written anything in months. The point is, even if I was a semi-decent writer to begin with, I was rusty as hell.

English 131 strengthened the writing skills that I typically avoided practicing, like citations, organization (a big issue that reared its ugly head when my writing wandered so aimlessly in my SA2), and formal writing. But in addition to strengthening my weaknesses, I was able to solidify the things I already knew that I enjoyed doing: exploring and diving into a topic (MP1 and MP2) and narrative writing, which I briefly got to play around with in SA1. And, of course, I learned new things. Getting a taste of audience-awareness was a big deal for me—I had written things for different audiences, but all on a subconscious level. I also got to explore my voice in this class, and it’s going to be an ongoing process to see how I can sound like myself in different contexts. Sometimes I worry how much personality I should pour into my writing, but after writing MP2 I realized that I could retain some of my own voice while following the formal nature of the genre. 

My SA1, MP1, and MP2 were my favorites to write and I think that they clearly demonstrate my understanding of each outcome. So if you haven't already, grab a cuppa tea and some reading glasses for the mountains of text that lie before you!