My experiences with writing/ English classes have varied year to year with the transition of new teachers. My "breakthrough" year, where I really started producing papers worth reading, was my Junior year of high school in AP Composition. The class was led by an elderly woman, a graduate of Northwestern who gave me no room to slack. I was expected to formulate good ideas and express them coherently using a wide array of diction and syntax. The whole year I struggled through the class but managed to end up with an A-. That class required me to work harder than I ever had (and probably will) to get a decent grade.
From that point forth I have seen a substantial improvement in my writing. We wrote personal narratives, definition papers, cause and effect, research papers and papers based solely on creativity. The range of lengths was anywhere from about 6 or 7 (narrative and creative) to approximately 10 or 12 (definition, cause and effect and research). In addition to all of this out of class writing, we usually had small in-class working assignments throughout the year. These included annotations of essays by authors such as Joan Didion, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Katherine Ann Porter, William Golding and many more. Most of these professional authors didn't blatantly state their thesis, so by careful analysis and interpretation of the tone, diction choices and rhetorical strategies, we were required to figure out their message.
My writing process, mostly due to AP Comp, is not reflective of a "procrastination style". I like to give myself plenty of time to look over and read what I have written even if it's just a rough draft. I typically find myself rereading the whole essay after I complete a paragraph because every time I find something to shift around and make sound better. I always use easybib.com for works cited and I need it to be really quiet when I write.
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