Reflection

I can honestly say that I have never been good at academic writing; people who know me well would be confused by this. Everyone knows that I write all the time. I've always kept a journal, write lots of short stories and am even attempting to write a book. In my book, the main character says, "I enjoy writing. I have this crazy love affair with paper that you couldn’t even imagine; it has been like that ever since I was young"(Chapter 9).   

I quickly learned in high school, however, that academic writing was not going to come easily. And despite knowing this, I did little to better myself academically. I would get frustrated, turn in what I had and accept my B or C. I would write all the time, working on personal projects and never saw value in spending time on academic writing. 


College has changed my view on academic writing and I have made huge strides this semester. I can see it in my writing. And this semester I did not just write, I revised each paper a few times. I think for every assignment we did I wrote one more draft than the last. On the final paper we wrote, our Exploratory essay (Draft 6)  I wrote six drafts of the paper. With each draft I liked the assignment more and grew confident. That was my mistake in high school; I would turn in early drafts before I matured and developed them. 
Because of the fact that enjoy writing a lot, sometimes I write way too much. When writing my Micro Theme, it was tough to limit all the things I wanted to say to only one page. I like long sentences and long paragraphs, but I have learned that more words do not make the value of the thought any greater. Shorter sentences and a one page assignment can be filled with interesting, thought provoking and diverse thoughts. It was tough at first, but I liked not having any personal thoughts or statements in this piece. On the other side, in the Exploratory essay that I mentioned earlier, I liked doing research and then adding what Dr. Kyburz called "Narrative glue". I love the term and never thought about it in that light. In research papers in the past I would restate or explain what had already been explained in my quote, and I never knew how to not do this; analysis or deep thinking about an academic topic was never a thing for me. 
The assignment that I genuinely loved (and wrote 7 drafts of) was my Rhetoricity Narrative. One of the things on the list of course learning objectives was to "Consider Real People". This assignment helped me do this, but not in the correct way that it probably supposed to. It helped me consider myself; let me explain what I mean. The inspiration and plot of the paper came from the book that I am trying to write that is also titled The Things We Regret. The way the book is currently written is I have put some of my personal experiences on a fictional character I created. I added some fiction and some stories I have been told by friends. But by writing this I started to own my story. I stripped away all of the fluff fiction and got down to the facts; what really did happen to me? I am giving credit to where it is due and considering the real person in the story, who is myself, something in the past I have never had the courage or strength to do. That is a HUGE thing, especially when it comes to the messy and tragically uncomfortable topic of mental health. 

I never knew a writing class could help me both learn and grow so much. They are usually tedious and dreadful and most students would agree. One piece at a time, I am beginning to enjoy academic writing. 

-Kayla Feigl 
Fall Semester 2017