MY PERSONAL WRITING STORY

During my lifetime, the word writing has been synonymous with a four letter word that you shouldn’t use in mixed company, or in any company for that matter. In fact, you could say it is an activity I have never enjoyed. I hear people talk about writing for the fun of it, or writing daily in a journal, or stating they enjoy writing someone a note. None of that has ever been true for me. I’ve always looked at writing as an assignment to be completed (under protest) or a requirement to fulfill a duty in my job. Over the course of my lifetime I have been given expensive journals in which to write; even one that is leather bound from England. I never enjoyed writing more than about half a page and I did that so I wouldn’t have to lie if the person making the gift asked if I had used their gift. I’m sure a lot of my feelings concerning writing have come about because I have never really practiced writing and I have never had the sense that I was good at it. In elementary school my language arts experience was basically diagramming sentences, reading Dick and Jane books, and doing book reports.
The first paper I remember writing and having true feedback on was a seventh grade writing assignment entitled “where will I be 25 years from today?” I do remember that at the beginning of the assignment I was a little excited. But, as I progressed through the pages it became less exciting and much more like an overwhelming task. Then as I looked at the red-marks on the paper there remained absolutely no excitement, but only a sense of fear and intimidation about the next assignment requiring that I write a paper. I should have realized that it was my very first assignment of writing, and that there should have been a lot of feedback. But, that had not been the case through seven years of school. In other areas of school work, I seemed to do well without a great deal of negative feedback, so this made me hate writing even more.

Another reason I believe writing is difficult for me is because I am a math person. In math you have a right or a wrong answer. You work with numbers that don’t change. On math problems I can logically go back and find mistakes. In writing, it seems that much is in the eye of the beholder. Writing is a very objective process and writing assignments are graded in an objective manner. I have a hard time getting my arms around such an arbitrary process.
Also, being a math person I look at things very realistically and linear. My writing is much like an equation, such as X + Y = Z. I like to write by placing one point of knowledge, or one idea one after the other, much like a list as opposed to paragraphs. There are not a lot of transitions and not a lot of necessary detail (or what I consider unnecessary detail) and no creativity. Who really needs all those pages and pages of words when a person can write all they really need to say in a few line?. Years ago, my wife, then girlfriend, wanted to borrow my “papers” from my college communications skills course as she was taking a similar course. She thought she would have it made, as she could just tweak my speeches, and be ready for class. What she found was basically one note card with major points for each speech. Everything I had to say came from memory and I had no problem filling my allotted time. I feel the same about writing – here are my points and all of the “fluff” is in my head.
I also feel I lack a sufficient knowledge of the mechanics of writing. I have a fear of where to place comas, colons, semi-colons and quotation marks. Then teachers and professors want things like thesis statements, strong openings and conclusions that tie everything together. How scary is it to try to fathom what meets those qualifications as they define them? Then there is the dreaded end of the paper and APA style puts fear in my total being; where do the italics go, where does the year go, and exactly how do you write the author’s name. These fears have gripped my entire writing life and have given me writer’s cramp.
I remember as a freshman in college the time I spent staring at a white piece of paper, with pen in hand, but nothing would flow onto the paper. I would just sit and hope, even though ideas would come to mind, I was intimidated about writing them on the paper, afraid that I would make a mistake in the mechanics of the writing. I do believe in the old saying “we learn by example”. I was never presented with what I would consider good examples of writing. Shakespeare, Chaucer and Whitman are not good examples for writing class assignments and it seemed we read a lot of these, but not many examples of papers.
Going back through my memory the only true example of writing that I had was during my junior year of high school. I had a teacher, who even to this day would intimidate me, who did show me some good examples of writing. Even though I had the examples and worked very hard on the assignments, when she graded my papers I believe she bought red ink by the barrel.
Not only was writing papers a cause for anxiety, but so was the fact that we had to start typing our papers. During high school and the first year of college the only way to type our papers was to use a typewriter. My junior English teacher did not allow any mistakes. I can’t even start to count the number of times I was almost finished typing the page when I made a mistake. I remember her saying “no correction fluid, no typeovers, it has to be perfect.” That by itself caused me to make more mistakes than I normally would.
All of these issues have compounded over the years making writing a very difficult task for me. At my job I find myself procrastinating when I need to write a letter or when I need to write an announcement or even something as simple as writing a get well note to an employee or student. My salvation in writing has been the advent of word processing programs. Thankfully, those programs check the spelling and give you a little bit of feedback on the grammar, and allow you to save your work and then you can go back, change and edit your work. I cannot imagine going into the dissertation process using an old manual typewriter. It would be interesting to research the length of those papers when the typewriters were used, compared to today using our personal computers.
I am very hopeful that this class will help me to improve the writer’s block I have often experienced, and then give me more confidence in my writing. I also hope that some of the mechanics I worry about will be explained in a way that doesn’t intimidate me the way they always have. I can already tell that the discussions we have had and will have in this class will be a great help and there is no doubt that our reading and writing will do nothing but help our own writing. Who knows maybe I can finish the dissertation and no longer see myself as a ostrich with its head in the sand when it comes to writing, and perhaps instead, I can soar like an eagle.