Hernández Rosa 1

Adriana Hernández Rosa

Professor Sara Thames

ENC 1101

27 August 2020

Reading Response 1

Think of something about writing (not related to grammar or “flow”) that you wish you

were more confident about. (Grammar and flow are two things students commonly say they want

to work on; we want to push you to consider other elements of writing.) When you’ve come up

with the thing you’d like to work on, explain why: What makes you uncomfortable with what

you know about it or how would you write right now? What do you imagine you could be doing

differently or better?

I have an insecurity about “answering all the questions” and “hitting all the points” in a

paragraph or essay. This feeling comes from teachers that look for very specific statements,

which I never new how to target. It seems that even when I believe I have done this effectively,

there’s always something I should have included or needed to clarify. It is hard because I

understand the topic, have developed ideas, and know what the answer is; it is just difficult to

express it cohesively through writing. When I write, sometimes I want or can add more, but can

not find the appropriate place do so, or sometimes when I read it over, I feel like I covered

everything I wanted to; which gives me a duality of feeling complete and incomplete

simultaneously about my writing.

I believe these feelings and insecurities can stem from comparing myself to my peers.

Being in the IB Program, I had extremely talented friends who helped me a great deal. However,
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this also put into perspective the differences between my writing and theirs; they were qualified

to give feedback and I was not. With all this said, it is all coming from my own insecure

perspective. In order to fix this I might just need to find what my writing style is. The author’s

statement that “you might think that you aren’t a very good writer… because you don’t do well

on timed writing tests like the SAT or school assessments” (Wardle and Downs 5) resonated with

me. Further, the comparison to how historians approach history as opposed to the way that it is

taught (7) helped me realize that there is more to writing I thought, and that with a bit of

experimentation I can find my voice.

Word Count: 295

Try to remember a time when a rule or rules you were taught about writing by one

authority (teacher, parent, boss) were changed or contradicted by another authority. What was the

rule? Did you understand the reason for the change or contradiction at the time? Were you

bothered by it? How well was the difference (and the reason for it) explained to you?

This has happened to me in freshman year of high school. As we approached AP exam

season, my history teacher told us not to worry about introductions for the DBQ, and to write the

thesis in isolation and to continue on. This direction contradicted what he had learnt in English

class entirely. The reason for this change made sense in the context in which it was administered.

During an AP test you have a limited amount of time to write; time that has to be accommodated

to also read 7 historical documents. Further the way they grade such exams is mostly on the

presence of the information, rather than the way in which it was constructed. Personally, I was

not bothered by the change, but it was a weird concept to get used to; the fact that my writing
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had to adapt to different subjects. This event happened again as I moved on and was taught to

write biology and chemistry laboratory reports as well as complete history and art research

papers. It is all about having to “recognize that the differences stem from different ideas about

what good writing is” and how my teachers were teaching me to “write like historians or

biologists.” (14)

Word count: 205

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Bibliography

Wardle, Elizabeth, and Douglass Downs. Writing About Writing: A College Reader. 3rd ed.,

Macmillan Higher Education, 16 Dec. 2016.