All Grown Up

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Sam Auvil
All Grown Up
Writing has never been my best subject; the rules and structure always seem to trip me up. All the different formats and types of papers all which you have to use a different style of writing. It’s all just confusing for me. But I do think that I grew a lot as a writer throughout my winter quarter English 151 experience. Although it took me a while to finally decide that I should put more effort into fixing the problem.
At first I continued to use my old writing habits just throwing words on paper and whichever ones stuck were the ones I would use. I hate rereading my work and editing, not to mention I suck at it.
But then I started to realize that my grades were riding on me becoming a better writer so I started to focus on the items that I thought I needed to work on. For example I figured that it would be a good idea for me to start editing my papers and also to have other people edit my papers. To makes sure they were following the format that they needed to but also to make sure that they were grammatically correct. This entire change in attitude took place while we were starting to write our research papers.
After the exploratory essay where the entire class was scolded for lack of effort I decided that I needed to step up. For example part of the exploratory essay read “Just the other day 10 people were killed by Cholera in Kuwanda on June 4.” Which is clearly a poorly written sentence, which if the paper had been revised
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would have disappeared. Also the paper was supposed to tell a story about how I acquired information pertaining to the topic. And throughout the paper I would tell details about why I looked for certain things although I never actually explained the researching process which was what the entire paper was supposed to be. So my grammar, sentence structure and content was bad in this paper.
For the actual research paper I tried to fix as many of those problems as possible. After re-reasearching to make sure that all the information would be relevant to not only the topic but also would fit in with the argument that I was trying to make, I wrote the paper. Although after the re-researching the six to eight page paper we were supposed to write turned to a twelve page paper, once I had said everything I wanted to. I then went and reread the entire essay and looked for mistakes. After that I reread the paper again just out loud this time. Catching as many mistakes as I could. I then asked a friend of mine who is in the journalism school to edit my paper. And she did amazing. So I figured I had two of the problems covered. Grammar and sentence structure. the last was the content. It was supposed to be an argumentative research paper, and I had my argument layed out in the paper exactly how I wanted it. But the problem I did not catch is that my argument wasn’t an argument at all. As my paper read and my thesis shows you “Poverty is something that should be eradicated whether it’s in the banana farms of Uganda or the coal mines of Appalachia. The attention of our aid should not only focus on third world countries such as Uganda, but they should also be shared
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with the poor in our own country. The poor of Appalachia suffer from mistreated and misused water sources, shortages in food quality and supply, and lack of health education and care, just like the poor of Uganda.” My argument was actually a comparission.
Although I did not achieve full success with my research paper I still believe that I learned an important lesson with my writing. That I really need to edit everything I write. And not just once multiple times to catch all the mistakes. I plan on taking this knowledge and building on it with each paper I write.