Disconnect” I was genuinely worried about UWP 7 and my own preparedness for the class, especially after I head about all of the writing we’ll be doing. Fortunately, after reading and seeing that college writing encourages less formulaic writing and more situational writing, I am now looking forward to the class. I hope I can learn more about structuring, finding evidence and citing sources to create a clear paper. I like the idea of college writing more now and feel less anxious about it.

 

Getting into the issues of the writing process in high school, I think that what most people learn in high school is how to follow a writing structure and put their topic’s information into that writing structure. I remember during my junior year especially because we had essays on book themes every quarter, the form factor in my papers almost were always the same, and that wasn’t necessarily bad, but the writing prompt didn’t require me to really think all that much. In high school, my essay process of writing often consisted of knowing the material, looking for evidence, wording my findings in a way that really drives home my argument and also make me sound “smart”. 

 

Anyhow, I look forward to learning and growing as a writer in this UWP 7.

 

In high school, I can easily recall writing five paragraph essays and following a specific structure. As a result, this has inevitably led me to despise English and writing classes in high school. After reading that article, it is almost liberating to find out that writing does not need to follow such a strict structure, and I am looking forward to being able to creatively write in many other styles.

Sometimes, these kinds of rules guide students to writing well as first, but it is essential to inform them that writing is a piece of art that only the writer is responsible of. However, as Warner showed, choosing the most expressive word for the intended theme of writing is a vital step towards being a great writer. Warner provided a clear example of this by distinguishing between the effectiveness of the word “skin” compared to “flesh.”

In my personal experience, every time I was taught writing, I had to learn how to structure drafts but not exactly how to “write” drafts per se. That method made me think of writing as a math course in which I have to memorize proposed methods to deal with numbers.

At the same time, this is the first time I have taken a writing class in the form of an online class because of the epidemic. I expected it to differ tremendously from my previous writing class, including the learning content, the way of communication with classmates and teachers, and the way of taking writing class on zoom; In my previous high school writing class, in most cases, what I learned was to write down appreciative or narratives articles which follow that same rule again and again. I am tired of writing the same topic and taking no changes. which I expected to find from my college life and UWP007Y. I hope to improve my writing level within this course, broaden my writing content, and make my writing style more native.

 

I have a different perspective on this, mostly due to the different education I received in a different country and in a different curriculum. I agree and understand where the authors perspective is coming from and agree with their outlook on the differences with college and high school writing, but they do not relate with my experiences of academic writing. I was taught to follow some rules, but not be limited to them, rather to expand and elaborate on my points instead of focusing so much on how many sentences are in a paragraph or what not to include in certain parts of my text. I hope to use my experience as well as the writings in the text to better my own works throughout college and beyond.

Personally, I found both texts to have well described the conditions of writing for high school. They highlighted what most discouraged me in my high school English classes, the preference for rules and strict standardized form over nuance and thought. It did not help that for many of my school’s English classes, the teachers seemed to rule with an iron fist, using these writing rules to extend their authoritarian control.

When it comes to my experience with academic writing, I did not go through the sets of “rules” for writing. My English teachers were very carefree with the words we used as long as they made sense with the context of our essays. We however, did have the rule of not using “I, we, or us” in one of our classes. Having this rule really confused me when writing for my other classes as I was unsure if we could use these words when writing academically. Other than the “I, we, us” rule, my teachers gave us the liberty to write our essays however we saw fit.

It was interesting to see and acknowledge the perspectives of different authors. I agree with some of the ideas that Warners' article stated. Where he talks about the rules because it's something that was introduced to me since middle school and continued all the way to high school. I feel like having these rules my writing always revolved around trying to satisfy those rules. I feel like they did help me in some ways but I always depended on those rules.

 Moreover, warner addressed that choosing a suitable vocabulary word is crucial in writing. Since there is difference between ‘Said” and “Barked” and “Skin” and “flesh”, it is really important for the writers to use vocabulary words that can touch the reader’s heart and mind (Pathos).

During my personal experience in high school, I honestly was only following the rubric/rules on the first page of the writing and wrote my essays according to the rules.

When I was reading about the rules it related a lot to my writing in high school because it was always centered around those rules. While I was writing I always had to stop and ask myself if I was following all the rules or if there was something I had to change in order to follow the rules to be able to get a passing grade.