My Writing Experience

In the past writing has been more of a stressful, negative experience versus a free expression of my thoughts. I am one of those people who meticulously chooses each word so by the time the paper is finished I feel more relieved than anything else. Sometimes my attention to grammar creates lapses in the fluidity of the paper so it’s generally a struggle to try to convey what I want to say accurately. I often feel that I worked so hard writing the paper that I don’t bother editing or rereading it, which I realize is a terrible idea.

I’ve done writing for most of my classes, especially the last two years of high school in the IB program. Through the program, I have written comparative analyses on books, a psychology type paper for “theory of knowledge”, research papers for history, several book critiques, and a couple of planning labs. The maximum number of pages I’ve ever written was probably 11 pages, a little less than 4000 words. I’ve had to do research for the majority of papers that I wrote. Honestly, because my English teacher was fairly lax on assignments and because IB English was not so demanding, I worked harder on research papers for history than papers about the books we read.

I tend to procrastinate on papers because I don’t feel the initiative to start early on papers.  I don’t like the feeling of staring at a blank document knowing I have to type so many words to get my point across. I never have the TV on when I write because it’s too distracting. When I’m trying to focus on a paper I usually don’t have any music on but if I’m trying to forget about how time consuming it will be for me to write a paper (when I’m first starting the paper) I tend to put music on, usually something instrumental. I find myself frustrated while writing because I usually try to produce a decent paper and I know it will take time to do so.