The Importance Of Writing Badly Essay

“And what matters in this journey-at least initially-is not what kind of car you’re driving, but where you end up.” This quote spoke to me on levels beyond writing. When you get to the end of your life, you will be less concerned on the little aspects of life, but more on the journey and outcome of life. I find “The Importance of Writing Badly,” an incredibly mind opening essay. I have truly never thought from Bruce Ballenger’s point of view. I completely agree with the writer. He writes about how teachers and other educators limit student’s writing imagination causing them to be unable to write. In the beginning, a doctor states “Can you believe those students had four years of high school and still can’t write?” The doctor assumes every …show more content…
Ms. O’Neil and Ms. Washington are the “high priest(s) of good grammar” who have “no patience for the bad sentence.” They expect students to write and make “words march down the page with military-precision.” To me, that means teachers want you to have the same perfect cookie-cutter essay as everyone else, one that does not test the boundaries of the teachers imagination and mind. When the writer uses the illustration, “they pace their rooms like expectant fathers, waiting to deliver the perfect beginning” he gives a marvelous description of reality. I cannot begin to explain all the times I paced around my bedroom brainstorming ideas. I would go through several different ideas until I came across one that would not be too challenging for me to complete. As I know that I am not the only student who has doubted their writing ability, I find it sad that instead of writing on a topic because we find interesting and relatable; we choose one based on its easiness because we’re afraid of the negative feedback from expanding ourselves. Writing should not be that difficult to …show more content…
I did not understand why the writer would desire for his students to write poorly. After reading the entire essay, I was mind blown at Ballenger’s discussion. The writer believed that if educators allowed for their students to write poorly instead of haunting them with the rules of grammar, then the students would be able to sufficiently improve as writers. If writing badly was allowed, students would not pull an all-nighter just to get an essay perfect. We have been transformed into writing perfectionists, not by delivering a perfectly moving essay, but by having it perfectly basic to seek the unlikely approval of the infamous ‘Grammar