Reflective Essay: A Candid Narrative

A Candid Narrative Up until recently, I hated writing papers. This seems like an ironic place to confess that, but it is true. I would dread the process of staring at a blank screen until I managed to get words to finally begin flowing. More than anything, I hated the revision process. I remember once I got a rough draft back from a teacher with some harsh criticism and nearly cried in class. I always hated my writing voice, it seemed too casual, not matter-of-fact enough. I would read papers from authors like David Sedaris and learn to hate my writing style because it was not theirs. I did not see the power it held until junior year of high school. My junior year English teacher had one of the worst reputations in the school. At any given …show more content…
That is, until it was time for our first research paper. The paper was a daunting task: five to six pages of nothing but well thought out and grammatically correct commentary on a job shadow completed earlier in the year. After beginning our research, yet another bombshell was dropped on us. After a certain date, we could do no more research. Any research done after that date would be considered plagiarism, whether or not it was cited correctly. Obviously, I waited until the night before our research was done to complete all of it. I stayed up late into the night reading about the “joys” of civil engineering: where you can get the best degree in civil engineering, where it costs the least or the most to get a degree in civil engineering. Before I knew it, a week had passed and our work in progress was due. Again, I had not even begun to work on it. I quickly threw together my best attempt at five pages of coherency and submitted it to the teacher. I am not even sure if I edited my rough draft before turning it in for the final draft. Needless to say, I did not do phenomenally on that paper. I repeated this process with the second paper, refusing to learn from any stress felt during the process of writing the first paper. That all changed when our final paper was assigned. We were finally given a chance to argue, not just