Essay Writing

When I was in high school, writing just was not my thing. I hated the closed-minded limitations of essay writing and the strict regulations that we were expected to follow. I feel like I never really learned how to write in high school, what I learned was how to plug-in information into a 5-paragraoh essay formula, that was never actually taught, but rather assigned. Reading Christensen’s chapter on Writing Essays forced me to relive some of the pretty awful experiences I had in high school but also helped me see that there’s a better way to do things. It also made me wish so badly that one of my English teachers had read this chapter and done what Christensen writes about. 

A lot of my teachers simply assumed we knew what to when it came to writing papers, and a few even acknowledged the fact that we didn’t but they didn’t have time to go over it during class. Looking back, I think that my teachers just didn’t want to deal with teaching something they felt we should already know – they saw it as a waste of time and let us fend for ourselves, but then questioned why our papers came out not meeting the standards they set out for us. Christensen says, “I used to get too technical, and I lost students and myself” (125). I think that this is so important to acknowledge and think it played a really big factor in why I disliked writing so much in high school. Christensen also acknowledges that doing the work of teaching students how to write in class is messy – but she also acknowledges that it’s worth it when students stay up all night to write a paper they are passionate about. 

Something else from Christensen’s chapter that I think would have been really beneficial in my high school experience is when she says, “I often draw a picture of a train on the blackboard. I mark the introduction/thesis as the engine, the connectors between the cars as the transitions, the cars as the evidence paragraphs, and the caboose as the conclusion” (123). This would’ve been better than the cut-and-dry technical outline where we basically just had to plug in the blanks. I think it’s also important that Christensen addresses the fact that students don’t want to write about things that don’t interest them. She asks some really essential questions – What moved you? What was important about this unit? What interested you? What do you want to tell other people about? (123)

I think that these questions tie really well into the other piece of material for this week, Cait O’Connor’s article, “Emotion and Intellect: An Unconventional Pair.” Asking students to write too technically marginalizes writers’ true voices. Asking questions like the one Christensen mentions would allow teachers to give their students room to express their emotions and write true to themselves. I think that O’Connor also poses a really important question when she asks, “How can we expect students at any level to write, either in or outside of school, about things that they are passionate about when we are asking them to also check that passion at the door for the sake of “objectivity”?

Overall, I think that there’s no way for writing to be authentic if the writers aren’t interested in the topic and meaningful writing doesn’t exist without passion. Looking back on my own experience, I always felt really discouraged from writing in high school because it was so technical, and I didn’t care for the assigned topic. I also was never really properly taught how to write, so it was always a toss-up between my teacher wanting things to be really exact and guessing how to do that. I think that Christensen and O’Connor make some really essential points about writing and how there’s always room to teach students to write properly AND room for emotion and passion.