Breaking Bad Habits, Creating Good Habits

Entry 5:

Reflection/Experience/Research

Topic: "Breaking out of habits that limit intellectual inquiry." -writingspaces.org

    Students are limited in showcasing their talents with the 5 paragraph method taught throughout their middle/high school. However, breaking old habits has always been hard.

    Having taken Advanced placement and honors English all throughout high school, we were taught to write our essays with 5 paragraphs. The format should have been paragraph one: Introduction, paragraph two to four: body, paragraph five: conclusion. A lot of students who did the five paragraph methods in my class often did worse on the essays than the students who made their essays sound good and only put in what they thought was necessary. 

    I noticed fellow classmates getting anywhere from a 7-9 and only writing 3-4 paragraphs especially with the time limit we had to write while everyone who was squeezing in 5 paragraphs would get like a 4-6. Now the teacher definitely told us to write what sounds like a 9 paper (I think they changed the grading scale since), it was hard for us to break habits. 

    "Through learning critical reading, freewriting, and outlining techniques," new writing strategies to help stimulate students writing. They say that these strategies can have new college students writing in multiple genres. What about these strategies helps to break students old habits taught to them and instilled in their minds? 

    When you read a document, reflect on what you exactly just read and then review. Ask yourself what the key points are; the "who","what","why","how", "so what". This is all a part of critical reading. When you figure out how to get good with this, you can really improve your writing tremendously. 

    Freewriting allows you to come up with topics and get you started a bit faster as you develop ideas while doing something productive with your time. Freewriting provides writers with providing structure, ideas, and more. Sometimes you may write 2 paragraphs out of an entire page while freewriting. The you can fix them up and now you are done with more than you thought you would be. 

    Outlining helps you plan out and organize how you want the thing you are writing to look. Outlines make your writing more successful towards achieving your writing goals.