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.

Questions in Writing

Entry 1: 

Reflective Interaction

Topic: Reading/Quote from Understanding Rhetoric: "Introduction: Spaces for Writing"  

"There's so much to say-- how do you know what's worth saying? And when to say it? And how?"

    Seconds after reading this, I began working on my blog. I started creating several rough drafts to capture what I want to say on this quote. Collecting and composing my thoughts into what I feel best portrays my emotions for this one sentence. 

    To state why I chose this three pages into the introduction, the reason I struggled so much on starting my commonplace I didn’t know what to say- the quote explains how I felt. 

    To break down my thoughts, I want to look at the quote in pieces and reflect further on it. To start, “There’s so much to say,” yes there is. There are 171,146 words in the English language and a lot of problems everywhere in the world. There should be a lot to say. “How do you know what’s worth saying,” you don’t. How do you know what to say when people in society today constantly judge you? You never know if people will like what you have to say in your work. 

    If you sit and consider that there are so many topics you can choose from, so many people to please, then no one would ever start sharing their thoughts with the world. You cannot sit down and work on something and expect to please everyone. While I understand writing is more for others than ourselves, some part of it is for us. Writing can be so powerful. Somewhere in this world- someone feels exactly the same way, somewhere your writing can help someone. Whether you write a blog, book, article, so on; you can help others. 

    The takeaway? You can never answer these questions if you close your mind from thoughts. How can your paper, story, whatever you write be wrong when it felt right to you? 

    To end- writing is unique to each individual person. So the questions you ask or the “how do you know what to say, when to say it, how to say it”- that is entirely up to you. No one else can tell a writer not to say what they want, how they feel, that it’s not the right time to bring something up. If you write it, when you write it, know that then the time was right, and that it was worth mentioning.