When I finished
and hit that send button I hoped that would be the last time I’d ever had to
deal with the University of Michigan orientation directed self placement
writing exam. It was only the second day of class when the unwanted happened. I
was asked to dig up the now two-month-old essay and reread it. Looking back on it
would only remind me of how unprepared I was for college writing. To my
surprise though, after reading through it that day, I did not necessarily feel
that way. Instead I was actually impressed with the essay I had written. While
it was great to feel this way, I was disappointed in myself as well. I had
spent a significant amount of time stressing over the assignment because I
worried that it would never be good enough for college. But sitting in the
classroom that day, I realized that I wasn’t a horrible writer; I just lacked
confidence in my writing. When all is said and done though, I regret the amount
of time I wasted stressing about the assignment when in the end it turned out
to be a well-written piece of work.
My anxiety first
starts the day I receive an assignment. I don’t take the time to carefully read
the instructions or make a plan before I tell myself that I will never be able
to accomplish what is being asked. Thus, the day I found out about the DSP was
no different. To start with, it was terrible timing. The due date was only a
week and a half away. It was a Wednesday, prom was the following Thursday, my
friends and I were going away that weekend and the DSP was due the following
Monday. The last thing on my mind was writing. Immediately I started to panic
about what I would write about and how I would meet the deadline. This was my
first real college writing assignment and I was barely comfortable with high
school writing.
Anytime I start to
feel this way, my first reaction is to call my tutor. I did realize though that
this was not the most ideal way to trouble-shoot my writing anxiety since I would
not have his guidance in college. However, when I did reach him that day, he
said he was not available until the end of the weekend and that I was to begin
the writing process on my own. His
advice: read the article (the DSP was a response to Amanda Ripley’s claims
regarding the impact of sports on the American Education system) and create a
prospective outline of my essay. Again, a wave of anxiety swept over me and for
the rest of the day I was distracted by my nerves about completing the DSP.
When I finally sat
down to the assignment that night, I noticed that I was being asked to make an
argument based on a background reading: in this case the reading was Amanda
Ripley’s article “The Case Against High School Sports”. In my AP English class
that year I had written argumentative essays on multiple occasions and so I
began to feel more prepared due to my familiarity with the essay’s structure. I
had a sense of how to approach making an argument based on previous readings
and how best to craft it. This helped to lessen the generalized anxiety I felt
before. I knew that qualifying a statement rather than simply supporting one
side would draw out an argument, making it easier for me to achieve the DSP’s
5-page minimum length requirement. This approach to Ripley’s argument was one
of the risks I took during this writing process. I knew that it could be
difficult to both defend and contend Ripley when she had already presented
reliable data to support her stance.
I find that when I
try to envision my final draft as one whole essay, I worry about how all my
ideas will come together to create a cohesive essay and where each piece of
evidence fits from the beginning to the end. The best way for me to accommodate
this uncertainty is to look at an essay as a puzzle. If I broke down the essay
into individual parts, than my essay would be organized into sub-dividing
topics. For the DSP, I broke down the essay into three parts: the beneficial
side of having sports embedded in school programing, the negative consequences
they can have, and the proposition of a solution for improving the balance
between sports and academics. Then I took each of the three sub-sections and
made each point of evidence its own paragraph. Not only did this allow me to
clearly see where I would include the specific references to Ripley’s argument,
but it also helped me to further the expansion of my essay to cover 5
pages. I do not feel as overwhelmed by a
writing assignment when I can take it section by section like smaller
individual essays. The following topic
sentences taken from my DSP essay show how the benefit of sports section was
divided into singular-point paragraphs:
-
“The origin of school-sponsored sports is also
related to the need for containment of violence.”
-
“The most notable health concern in America is
obesity.”
-
“Lastly, in an environment where it has been
known that children form their own groups and others struggle to find their
identity, sports help to promote a sense of belonging.”
Working section by section as if
dealing with smaller individualized essay, I notice I do not feel as
overwhelmed.
Using
sub-divisions allowed me to successfully incorporate the necessary point of
evidences I had in my argument. It was important that I found the correct
places for all data, both from Ripley’s article and my outside knowledge in
order to strengthen and support my own argument. This brings up another place
in which I took a risk in the writing process. Instead of simply adhering to
Ripley’s information and only noting the examples she included in her own
article, I took it upon myself to find outside examples. This can be seen when
I referred to the movie Coach Carter to support my notion that the
emphasis on sports in school systems should be re-evaluated.
Once
my outline is finished, I finally feel confident my direction and can visualize
the essay as a whole. One would think I had overcome my anxiety, but instead,
my anxiety shifted to what I consider part two: actually writing the essay. I
was now anxious about how I was going to write it because my two most
predominant challenges are crafting complex sentences and writing topic and
concluding sentences.
With
regards to the former challenge, I have been told that my vocabulary and
sentence structure is basic and that I tend to be very wordy when writing.
Rather than sounding like a sophisticated scholar, my works seem to mimic that
of a 9th grader’s paper. Fixing this can be as simple as revising my
work once a draft is complete, however, I was so intent on finishing my DSP
that I didn’t want to take the time to revise it. Thus, I sent it off to my
tutor as soon as I finished so that he could assist in the re-wording and
revising. I now realized that this might not have been the smartest decision.
If I had taken the time to revise my own work, or at least be present when my
tutor did so, I could have learned why certain changes were being made and
later have applied them to a following piece of writing. Unfortunately I still
do not feel that I have the skills to successfully edit my papers in such a way
that I can transform them from a basic rough draft to a scholarly, college
acceptable final draft.
The
latter of the two challenges relates to not only to sentences, but to
introduction and conclusion paragraphs as well. I have the hardest time finding
the right phrasing that is not too general or too specific. It is possible that
it takes me 10 minutes just to write the first two sentences on an essay. This
is the result of my desire to perfect my writing in the first draft so that I
do not need to revise it. I do realize, although, that my experience with
writing would be easier if I just simply wrote what comes to mind the first
time and then re-read and revise my essay to make my ideas sound more complex
and mature. Through the writing 100 course, I hope to not only improve upon my
first drafts by learning how to naturally add complexity to my writing but to
be able to return to a simple first draft and enhance it.
As I reflect on my
experience with the DSP, I find that the challenges I faced are not solely
applicable to this assignment. Through my career as a student I have
encountered similar obstacles in all my writing assignments, ranging from
argumentative essays to creative fictional stories. Taking the time to do an in
depth study of myself has allowed me to see exactly where my weaknesses lie. Although
I do not plan on my stress and anxiety simply disappearing after this, I now
understand what the leading causes of stress are in writing. Hopefully the
writing 100 coarse will help me build new strategies to lessen this anxiety. Being
less stressed and anxious over writing, which will follow me throughout college
and the rest of my life, will allow me to be more focused on other schoolwork
and also put more energy into other assignments. If I can end this semester
feeling more confident about my writing capabilities, I believe I will get more
out of my U of M education because I will be focused and prepared for future
assignments.
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