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Model #3

A Gradual Bloomer

As I grew up, my thoughts were far from school. I would spend my time thinking about hunting or fishing, playing basketball, or just about anything: anything, that is, but my schoolwork. Neither my teachers nor anything else motivated me toward an interest in school. Yet, two significant things have occurred during these past few years to change my opinion about writing. First, I began to become interested in knowledge in general, which included writing. Second, the instruction I began receiving at Eastern Oregon University was much greater than I had received before. These two factors have caused me to be a much more serious student, and I have finally started to bloom as a writer.

The earliest memory I have of learning to write is from the seventh grade. Our class was making a book full of stories that each of us had written. I wrote a story entitled "Do Unto Others" about an ungrateful mouse that was killed by a lightening bolt after being unkind to another animal that had showed him kindness. When I turned my story in, the teacher simply added it to our "storybook" without correction or opportunity for revision. However, at that time in my life I didn’t really care about writing; therefore, I was happy that we didn’t have to "mess" with our papers again.

The next memories I have of writing are from high school. Again, it was the same old method: the teacher would return my paper with all of my mistakes marked (usually punctuation and spelling) with no chance for revision—in other words, there was a lot of emphasis on correctness, and none on the global issues like thesis, body, organization, and so on. I vividly remember a period of two weeks my junior year when we were given several assignments to write poems. I wrote a poem called "tear" (the kind you cry). It was one of the first heart-felt pieces of writing I had ever produced. In it, I contemplated the ways I saw my girlfriend’s love for her father the night her took his own life. Yet again, as always, my teacher returned our poems—this time she didn’t even write marks on it—and I just stuffed it into my backpack and forgot about it. I didn’t have a real interest in writing, and my teacher’s lack of interest failed to pull me from the mire of disinterest.

After I graduated from high school, I served two years in the Army and then began to attend a community college. While attending, I was exposed to some beginning writing courses. During that time, I naturally developed a process "sort of" approach to writing: I would freewrite, then look back over my paper and make changes as I saw necessary. Yet the depth of instruction that I was receiving did not take me much further than I had been before. The main lesson I learned during that time was that a good college paper includes an introduction, body, and conclusion. Beyond that, I made little progress, and I was still a mediocre writer at best with a long way to go.

After my time at community college, I took a short sabbatical from school then transferred to Eastern Oregon University. It was soon after I began attending EOU that things began to change. My professors made me write more than I ever had, and they would often encourage revision of our papers, thus introducing me to a new aspect of writing—one which involved a process. I began to learn that most, if no all, good writing was produced through a process of revisions. That is, a writer works in a more circular manner—making changes along the way, starting over with a new thesis if a better idea comes to mind, rearranging paragraphs for better organization, developing an idea further after he or she rereads the paper and notices a lack of content, and so on.

I had an opportunity to see writing done as a process first hand my first year at EOU. My professor assigned a paper in which I had to write a fictional story. I decided to write a slightly changed version of an experience I had during Desert Storm. In my story, I describe an incident in which two soldiers have an argument resulting in the larger one threatening the smaller one with physical violence. Rather than wait for the larger one to act, the smaller one decides to try to kill him by putting a poisonous scorpion in his boot. Yet before he has a chance, the two become friends and the smaller soldier abandons his plan. After we had completed our assignments, my professor first had us exchange our papers amongst our peers for advice. Next, we handed in our papers, then a couple of days later they were returned to us with suggestions for revisions. We were given a couple more days to make these and other revisions before we handed our papers back in. I have found this process approach to be a common technique at EOU, and have since learned other techniques that I can use while writing, such as idea generating techniques like brainstorming and clustering, and heuristic approaches like the Pentad.

I believe my newfound interest in, and deepening understanding of writing will greatly improve not only the work I do in school, but also the work I do in the future as a teacher (and author?) Though it has taken several years for me to bloom as a writer, I have (Lord willing) a lot of years ahead of me to use the skills that have taken so long to mature within me. I am looking forward to learning more about writing during the remaining time I have at Eastern and am taking full advantage of the resources that it affords me.