Remember the 5 paragraph essay?

Hope everyone had a great weekend! There was a lot of reading, but I wanted to focus on the the differences between college and high school writing- I thought the story about the two very different first year college students was really interesting and it took me on a little walk down memory lane...

As I was doing the reading from The Transition to College Writing, I naturally couldn't help but to think about my own transition in writing from an awkward high schooler to a quirkily developed junior in college. I decided to look for an old high school paper to read on my computer and see how much had really changed in the past 3 years.... I realized that my writing hadn't really gotten that much better, but it just somehow sounded really different. I couldn't really figure out what had changed- I was still sticking to the basic intro, body, conclusion format, and still going about the writing process in the same way that I did in high school, but something about my writers voice seemed to have changed after my first year of college. Then, I think I figured out what it was. I think that one of the things that college writing does, especially if you find yourself taking a lot of humanities classes, is it lets you experiment with your style through more non-traditional, less pressure filled situations. This blog for example, or short opinion reading responses or those annoying 2 page writing responses that you turn in on blackboard- I used to think that this kind of" psuedo academic writing" was a waste of time... what could it possibly do to help get me an A on the typical 6 to 8 page paper? But then I realized that it can do alot in terms of developing an idividual voice and striking a balance between who you are as a person and what your paper needs to be as a student writer. I found that my college papers, especially after taking my first class that required reading responses, seemed so much less mechanical and more like a reflection of my own voice. For me, experimenting with less structured ways of writing showed me how I really wanted to write but usually couldn't for the fear of academic retribution. I can't speak for every high school, but at least at mine, we never had that opportunity. It was either a 5 paragraph essay or a creative writing piece... it was never a bit of both, and for me, that was the biggest transition into college writing. Learning how to write an academic paper that is a working relationship between educational information and individual voice is something that I could never accomplish in high school... there was never a simultaneous combination of opinion and information, it was always just information... guess i needed college to build on the opinion part...

Hope that everyone has a lovely week!

-Gyra