Throughout high school, much of my time in English class was consumed through the practice of “timed writing” assignments. The practice, to which, appeared unrealistic to compose a well-written essay. Moreover, these “timed writing” assignments, ironically, provided no “time” for narrowing down the abundance of thoughts that consumed my mind. As I transitioned from a high school English class to a college English class, I found myself amazed by the amount of knowledge we shared with one another. I walked out of every class with my head in a swirl of thoughts due to our group discussions. Shortly thereafter, I came to the realization that I lacked the ability of narrowing down these thoughts and ideas that consumed my mind. I began to notice that I had a difficulty in deciding what to write, and how to write, a blog post or an essay that incorporated all of it. As the semester began to dwindle down, I learned that the skill of “narrowing it down” is an important practice that only develops as one grows and advances in their writing skills.
Aforementioned, in high school when practicing our writing skills, we were never given a sufficient amount of time to truly gather and narrow down our thoughts to focus in on one particular topic. More often than not, I was asked to compose an essay on the entirety of a novel in sixty minutes or less. Therefore, as Professor McCoy mentioned in a comment for one of my blog posts, “everything had to be the broadest possible strike: get in, get out.” Thus, when crafting my first blog post for my English 203 class, I nearly regurgitated everything we conferred about in the first two months of the semester, as a way to incorporate all of it. However, in doing so, I wasn’t able to narrow down my thoughts and focus in on anything specific. Thus, I restricted myself from being able to explain or “unpack” my thoughts thoroughly and provide textual evidence as support for my interpretations. This restriction made it difficult for my readers, especially those “who can’t get inside your head without stealing or guessing at your meaning”, as Professor McCoy stated in a comment for one of my earlier blog posts.
In addition to composing blog posts, Professor McCoy had assigned an essay for the class to compose as well. The process of writing and posting on the blog was a way for us to practice and improve our skills as a writer. However, due to my excess of procrastination, I had prolonged the act of writing blog posts, thus, diminishing my chances at improving my writing skills. Therefore, after receiving feedback from Professor McCoy on this essay, it was evident that I had continued to struggle with the skill of taking an abundance of ideas and thoughts and narrowing them down into a concrete and effective argument. Thus, in a comment for this essay, Professor McCoy stated that, due to my abundance of thoughts, I had “two separate essays” in one. Ultimately, I had come to the realization that this constant struggle was due to the fact that I wasn’t engaged in the practice of blogging, whose purpose was to assist in the improvement of my writing skills. I began to notice that another source of my continued struggling was due to the amount of freedom that I was given. In comparison to the type of writing I was doing in my high school English class, blogging was entirely different. For instance, the blogging assignment had an open-ended prompt which led to a difficulty for me when it came to deciding what I wanted to write about because I was given the opportunity to write about anything. Therefore, when it came to narrowing down my thoughts, I struggled because my head was always consumed by a swirl of ideas and interpretations that I wanted to write about. For instance, in my first blog post, I tried incorporating my interpretations of Percival Everett’s Frenzy while discussing how the tweet of “suspicious pants” related to Percival Everett as an author. After re-reading this blog, it has now become evident that I was attempting to focus on too many thoughts and ideas at once, so much so, that I wasn’t able to “unpack” or explain my interpretations.
As the semester proceeded, I began to practice my writing skills more by composing more blog posts. I started to notice that the more I practiced my writing, the more my writing skills improved and the more I evolved as a writer. This became most evident to myself, and Professor McCoy, in my fourth blog post when she stated that this was my “strongest writing” thus far. Additionally, Professor McCoy asked me, “Do you see any differences? If so, what are they and how do you account for them?” After receiving this feedback, I decided to read through my blog post once more and reflect on the differences I had noticed between this post and my prior posts. One notable difference that I had observed, as I re-read that blog post, was that I had finally began to acquire the skill of narrowing down my thoughts and the ability to focus in on one specific topic. As a result of finally being able to focus in on a specific topic, I was able to explain my thoughts more thoroughly because I had one concrete topic to fixate on. In addition, I was also able to elaborate and expand on my ideas by providing evidence that supported my claims because I had more space to evolve them. For instance, in my fifth blog post, I contributed textual evidence from Joe Moran’s Interdisciplinarity to help support my claim on how two distinct disciplines can intertwine with one another. In doing so, I was able to develop a deeper understanding of the concept I was writing about for myself and my readers.
Throughout the semester, it became easier to produce more blog posts as I became more proficient in narrowing down my ideas and thoughts. I began to concentrate on organizing the ideas I wanted to write about to avoid focusing on too many at once. After developing this newly acquired skill, I was now able to fixate my attention on other aspects of my writing. I began to relate the blog posts that I was writing, on the material and information we learned in class, to my personal life. For instance, in one of my blog posts on disciplines, I connected a presentation that I attended on literacy and its application to all disciplines, given by Professor Christine Green, to a novel, Interdisciplinarity by Joe Moran, that we conferred about in class. In doing so, I was able to further my understanding, as well as my readers’ understanding, on how the two disciplines, humanities and science, interlace.
Moreover, the process of “narrowing it down” allows writers to become more effective in their writing. In my opinion, the ability to focus in and truly explain your interpretations and findings enables readers to grasp a deeper understanding of one’s writing. In addition, it allows writers to expand and adequately get their point across to their readers because they are fixated on a specific idea, instead of various ideas at once. In addition, once I learned how to narrow down the concepts I was writing about it became easier to write a more detailed and specific blog post or essay, as oppose to a broad, generalized one, because I was focused on one particular idea. Furthermore, the act of “narrowing it down” is an important practice that only develops as one continues to grow as a writer and advance in their writing skills.