This post has special significance to me because I am a senior. I have four years of college writing under my belt from many different disciplines, even other languages! Here is a list of just a few classes I can think of off the top of my head that were writing intensive or where a written assignment was a big part of the class: Expository Writing, Fiction, Research Methods II, Intermediate Spanish, Women and Sports, and Mythology and Folklore. I'm sure I could think of more if I thought really hard.
But from these classes, I recognize three different "types" of writing: essay writing, scientific writing, and creative writing. Of all the classes I have taken, Expository Writing most helped my essay writing. I took this class my very semester here at OU and I'm SO glad I did. I saw huge improvements in my essays after just one semester. It is amazing how far your writing can come in a few months when you have an excellent instructor with a relatively small number of students to attend to. This was the last composition class I will probably take in my life and I'm so much the better for it.
Research Methods II is a psychology class (and I'm a psych major) that teaches you the basics of how to conduct research in psychology. Since I want to conduct research in graduate school, this class was an important one for me to take. At the end, you got to design and run your own experiment then (where it was most helpful to my scientific writing skills) write a research paper and present a poster to the class. I worked really hard on my research paper (it is probably still the longest one I have written to this day) and I ended up winning first prize in my class for my experiment. This was definitely one of my favorite writing experiences here at OU.
Finally, I come to my favorite class this semester: Mythology and Folklore! Obviously, the style of writing this class has helped me with most is creative writing. I've gotten a lot of positive feedback about my writing and it has honestly blown me away. Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to be an author, but I didn't think I would be any good at it. This class has been a major confidence booster and I've learned a lot about myself as a writer and what my strengths and weaknesses are. I hope to continue to read literature that I love and write stories that other people like once this class is over.
Overall, I've had wonderful writing instruction here at OU and I think my writing has improved significantly in four years (even more so than it did in four years of high school). I owe many thanks to the awesome instructors who guided me and taught me how to be a better writer, including the instructor for this course, Laura Gibbs!
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| Writing with a pen, the way I like to write when I write for myself (Wikipedia) |
Shelby,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this thought-provoking and inspiring analysis of your development in writing! That is really cool to hear, and I like how you've split up the different styles of writing in which you've been trained, and then followed those up with specific examples.
As I was reading your post, I suppose I wondered whether or not you regarded the end of your college writing experiences as the end of your writings, as a whole. I was glad to see that this was not the case - it would be frightening to see a world where people could not effectively convey themselves through the written word!
Anyhow, best of luck with the rest of your semester, and with all the writing that you do in the future.