Throughout the duration of this course, I have learned many things. Most importantly, I have learned that writing is a process, drafting is a process and the rewriting a piece of writing does not mean you failed. Beginning the course and especially throughout high school, I had on a very straight forwardmindset about writing. Sure, I had taken Foundations of Creative Writing last semester but when it came to academic writing, it had been something I had always dreaded doing. When turning in a rough draft and immediately didn’t receive the best feedback or having the professor say, “this needs to be improved”, shutting down and giving up was my go-to coping mechanism. Throughout this semester, even though it has been my third semester in college, I learned how important it is to not look at writing as needing to be immediate perfection, but more so as what it really is, a process.
When reflecting on high school, most teachers taught using the same concepts: learning, teaching and writing, for the grade, and not to learn. I did have some really amazing teachers that truly did care about if I was learning and how I was learning, but a lot of my teachers did not. In most cases, while writing papers in high school, most teachers did not only teach for the prompt but also graded you on your ability to write to the prompt. Because of this mindset being taken on by most of my teachers, the writing process became something very generic and students were writing to get a good grade and not to learn or understand the material on a deeper level, we were simply writing for an A. This led to students getting in a bad habit of waiting to the last minute to do something and still getting an A on it. Especially within students who were in advanced and honors classes. These habits formed because the writing assignments given to students could be done quickly without engaging into the assignments on a deeper level and thinking about what was to be written. Because of these habits, I didn’t practice writing to learn and grown, instead, practiced learning how to write to get an A on the assignment rather than engaging and interacting with my writing.
When I started college last year, I continued to practice these habits of procrastination, doing just enough and expecting straight A’s as a result. Unfortunately, since most of my class load my freshman year was intro level classes, these habits still worked for me throughout the year. I wasn’t getting the A’s anymore, but was getting passing grades and accepted those grades. This mindset sent me down a deep and dark hole in the academic world, I was okay with doing just enough to pass the class and not caring. I was okay with the fact that my GPA could be a 3.5 or higher but was a 3.0 or lower. I continued to have this mindset until the middle of my third semester at Geneseo. I was a newly changed English major, but I still wasn’t trying to work hard on my writing. Once entering Professor McCoy’s class, I was stuck in a fixed mindset, where I thought I couldn’t fix my work ethic, where I felt hopeless and felt like a failure because I wasn’t getting the good grades anymore. I was beyond frustrated with myself. Throughout this semester, I did a lot of self-reflecting and realized the mindset I was stuck in was very detrimental to my academic success.
I have always gotten frustrated with the revision process until this semester, because high school had trained my brain to think that if my feedback wasn’t great on something, that I had failed and then led me to give up trying to work on it. However, my current course load really caused me to need to step up my academics. This switch between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset was very challenging for me, because I had been stuck in the fixed mindset for so long. But the switch was critical to be able to see success in my academics. This led me down a road of self-improvement especially revolving around my grades and work ethic. By practicing my writing throughout this class itself, really helped not only the improvement of my writing, but also my work ethic and how I responded to criticism, good or bad.
When I first got my rough draft for the Frenzy/Bacchae essay back, I immediately was frustrated because it wasn’t the feedback I thought I would receive. Professor McCoy thought my essay needed to be rewritten and completely reworked, which it did, but since throughout high school and my first year, revision meant failure in my eyes, I shut down after I received the feedback I did. After closely reading my first draft again, I realized I had a lot of claims that were not backed by textual evidence, “Everett added Velpo as a character solely for the purpose of his readers being able to interact with Dionysus on a deeper and more in-depth way”. However, when finally meeting with Professor McCoy, she said something that really resonated with me, she said “revision doesn’t mean failure, revision is part of the writing process”. This was my turning point, although I wish it had come earlier in the semester because I had dug myself a very deep hole, and it was a very hard to get out of. When I finally decided to rewrite my essay, I saw how much work it needed, and I took the steps I needed to take in order not to fail the paper, which thinking back, was a huge step in my journey this semester. Instead of using a claim I could not prove, I revisited my claim and reimagined it completely, “Everett not only allows his readers to understand the reasoning behind Dionysus’ decisions and actions but also shows that Dionysus is capable of having empathy and not just self-centered feelings like his character had in The Baccahe.” This class showed me how much effort I had to start putting in to my work in order to get the grades I used to. Throughout the class, I definitely have some regrets, I wish I had put way more work into my blog posts than I did, because I would’ve had a lot more to say about the quality of my writing improving and changing rather than just how my work ethic changed. However, my writing did improve, maybe not in the biggest way but this class definitely impacted how I read and how I wrote to think and not just for the assignment.
This class helped me practice how to write knowing the fact that the public will be able to read it instead of just a professor. The blog posts helped me craft my thoughts about reading, which in turn ultimately made me think and engage with my readings more. Because I had to create blog posts based on my readings, I had to engage with the texts but also bring my own ideas into the mix. I truly think this helped me learn and reader deeper than I have in the past. The worst one of my blogs was Friendship, this piece was rushed and definitely not my best work nor informed with evidence. “Dionysus had created Vlepo for himself, because I think even gods needs friends, even if they were self created. Vlepo showed loyalty and trust to his “friend” Dionysus.” This statement may have been true but the lack of text based evidence puts a hinder on any point that potentially could’ve been made. I had a couple blogs that were just enough to pass the assignment but did not put all the effort I could’ve into it, these posts include: Knowledgeable Learning, Playing Around With Words, Does Money Really Buy Happiness?.These posts didn’t get such great feedback, although I knew that the feedback I received on them wasn’t going to be great, but I knew they would be just enough to pass, which they were. I wish I had gone about the blog project better. My one post that I put an amount of effort in was The Beautiful Order of Alphabetical Order, this post got the highest grade out of all and got the grade it deserved which I was happy with. I played around this my words and thoughts in this piece, which created a strong claim “By doing this, Everett is taking the strict alphabetical order the English language has and twisting it to cause disorder so to speak”. The group blog post helped me work with people besides just myself and forced me to collaborate with others to formulate a coherent blog post, Fesmerization.The Frenzy/Bacchae essay helped my writing develop in that I had to find a correlation between two texts, therefore I had to dive into each of the texts and interact with them on a very deep level. The revision part of the essay helped me grow tremendously as a writer. By giving us the chance to rewrite our papers, the class got a chance to think about deeply where they went wrong and how to fix it to make it better. Before this class started, I always thought that revision was only necessary when the original was terrible and hopeless, but throughout this class, I have learned that revision is essential to any piece of writing.