Ch. 12- Teach Writing Your Way

        This chapter helped me to see writing in a different light. Very similar to the author of the chapter, I always wrote one single draft, fixed a few misspellings here and there, and then resubmitted practically the same copy without really learning anything about myself and my writing skills. While this behavior has mostly me to blame, it is also somewhat the fault of my teachers, who allowed me to continue writing in this way. I always complained about having to write multiple drafts, stating that “I never had anything to fix.” This is the same mentality that I have in a lot of areas of my life, and it is really just an excuse not to look in and see my faults and the places where I need help. This halted my progress and improvement as a writer and a student. When I am a teacher, I plan on asking my students to write short answer and essay responses to some of my exam questions for practice on the AP test. If I allow my students to do the same thing that I have always done, then they too will be stuck in a rut, never improving their writing skills, and never quite able to achieve the goals that they want to reach. I will encourage my students to read their writing out loud to themselves, as well as seek peer and teacher revisions before writing their final draft of any paper.

            I also noticed that this author was a lot like me, in that I don’t really ever plan my writing. I start with a thesis statement, and see where it takes me. Even as I go to college I have been spending the last several years writing a young adult fiction book, and each time I go back to begin writing again I surprise myself with new ideas and new directions for the book to go in. I believe that this process is very valuable and greatly improves the writing that I put forth. The same idea goes in a science classroom. One must have patience and be willing to fail and start over, especially when performing experiments in which the hypothesis is almost never correct. Just write another hypothesis and begin again until you reach success.