Emily Plower- Blog Post #1 ENC 1101

My anxiety with writing lies at its most fundamental root, grammar. I can remember always excelling in math, science, and reading when younger, but grammar, was always my weak point. While other students would point out sentence structure and prepositional phrases, I watched frozen and unknown of the correct answer. A perfect example of this was during the SAT, one of my first practices that I took I received a writing score of a 480, which was almost 200 points lower than my other sections. With this score though I received tutoring and countless worksheets that my tutor would promise me, weren't used in her second grade class to teach her younger students, but secretly I knew they were. Receiving such a low score and needing so much help humbled me, but also added to my insecurities in my grammar and worried me that my writing would come across as "unintelligent" or "awkward". I improved however and received a 550, which isn't the best, but for me, it was a huge accomplishment. I could relate to Sarah Allen's "The Inspired Writer vs. The Real Writer" in that it made me feel like I wasn't alone in this struggle of writing. She comments that people assumed she was "good" at writing because she liked to do it, but in reality that was in many ways the thing that enabled her own writers block at times. I also really liked the idea of revising, that fact that one can go back and revise their work and to improve upon it, in my case, grammar and mechanics. It takes time to write a polished paper and the first draft is only the beginning. I now notice that writing will continually involve and that the paper I wrote for a first draft and that is filled with mistakes is okay, because it can be changed and improved upon, and edited for those potential embarrassing mistakes in grammar.