When I was younger I had a lot of trouble when it came to writing assignments. I would always get in my own head about it, always thinking about how what I was writing wasn’t good enough to even be submitted. I remember exams in my Freshman year of high school where I would write two sentences for the long response sections, because I truly believed that anything else I would write would be worse than nothing at all.

I had always liked matoneth as a lad, it appealed to me in its simplicity. You see, there were no two ways about it when it came to math, you either had the right answer or you didn’t. Even when there were multiple ways to get that answer, chances are they were still the same method in different manners. Not so with writing. When it came to writing, I kept struggling up until the middle of high school. At that point, it was like a simple math equation: either I did the assignment and I passed, or I didn’t and I failed. No two ways about it. From that point, my ultimate ideology when it came to writing went a little something like this: “Get it done.”

I’ll admit that I haven’t thought much about my own theory of writing. However, looking back at my writing and the way that I do it, I definitely have a process by which I do these things.  When it comes to actually getting in and writing it, I go back to that “get it done” attitude. I’m not typically one to take risks when it comes to my writing, for better or for worse. I like to keep the format itself as simple as possible, while doing odder things when it comes to subject matter during brainstorming. While other people were looking at Climate Change and technology, I chose a more esoteric topic of alcoholism in Judaism. I’ve noticed this in another class I’m taking, being public speaking. That class also had people doing presentations on things like social media or gun violence, while I prepared a whole slideshow about the history of the Gregorian Calendar (while trying to make it a little entertaining at that, too). I think that when it comes to writing, there’s no harm in keeping to a regular format. I’ve only seen two plays in my life, and both times they were ones that were clearly designed to be variations on typical formulae for those who knew them, but I didn’t know those formulae. It’s one thing to want to make it wild and variant when you’ve been working with the same thing for a long time, around other people who’ve been doing the same thing for a long time, and a change of pace is appreciated; but it’s a different situation when you’re marketing to the average individual.

My audience is as typical as anyone’s audience would be in a class like this: the professors. Most of the students in this class had just been in high school, a system that’s notorious when it comes to the standards by which written assignments are done. There is a certain language and format that comes out when the teacher is expecting certain things from you. The genre’s always the essay with an explanatory tone in the medium of a handful of typed letter pages, with the topic statement, the preview, the body paragraphs, the information, the analysis, and the conclusion. It’s been drilled into me to the point where I do it subconsciously when writing other things. Whenever I open a new document to write, I always make it Times New Roman 12 pt. font, double spaced, because if I don’t, it just looks wrong. In fact, I wrote this double spaced and then just changed it back to single. My purpose is simple: make it readable, and make it seem professional. Personally, I do have a bit of a personality and a wit when it comes to certain topics, but I choose not to include them because it would feel wrong. Something about jokes in explanatory text just rubs me the wrong way. To me, the personality and the jokes and the wit work best in person, when you have context and other people and a rapport.

Peer review had been quite useful in these situations. I find that I am not always the best at judging my own work, and a different fresh pair of eyes can illuminate the things that I have missed. The revision process is usually a swift one, as my first drafts are rarely ever worse than needing a few touch-ups.

This “just finish it” attitude was changed and challenged a bit when it came to this class. I no longer felt like it was just a matter of ejaculating the right words in regards to what the assignment was looking for. There was some leeway to it, some more wiggle room for expression. There’s some more space for snark and personality. The ones that changed my perspective are the Two Genres assignment, and kind of this one. Those are the assignments that allowed more of a personality, instead of trying to focus on stating information.

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