Blog #1 - Allison Clarke-Hall

For as long as I remember writing has always caused me anxiety. From informal writing such as a personal journal to my senior project research paper, I have never felt secure that I am anywhere near decent in conveying my words on paper. When I think about it, I cannot pinpoint the exact origin of my "writing-phobia". My anxiety does not just derive from grammar or page length. Not from vocabulary or the due date. I feel apprehensive in every way when it comes to writing. When it comes to classroom writing assignments I usually receive a decent grade of an A or B but when it comes to nation writing tests such as the Graduation Writing Test I had to take in 11th grade or the SAT and ACT, I have always received a less than par score. I have a feeling it has to do with the fact that I am awful as revising my own papers. I mean, I can find the punctuation errors easily enough but I can never efficiently improve my sentence and paragraph structure. Another one of my causes of uneasiness spawns from my lack of flowing ideas. When I'm writing a paper, I always have the basic outline of all the points I want to cover in the paper. Now, this is easy enough to write in a paragraph but if I left the paragraph at that, I would have a bunch of three sentence paragraphs. I always have a hard time with the fluff aspect of the paper. When trying to come up with those extra sentences that support the main point of the argument or fact, I always end up just staring the computer screen for twenty or so minutes before deciding to add a few prepositional phrases here and there to increase my word count. Like Sarah Allen said, I have always wanted to be the "Inspired Writer". I have always wanted to be the writer who is able to easily communicate ideas on a piece of paper. But in reality, those writers do not exist and the only way to become a good writer is to develop the skills (like grammar, sentence structure, organization, etc.) needed to successfully communicate to the reader.