I started off this year with an essay about myself. That was my first mistake. I mean, it was the assignment, it was literally a personal narrative essay. And I took it literally, and I wrote about myself. But why do that. There’s a million things that count as a “personal narrative”, and I’m certain I could write those 10 times better than what I did. But I looked at the problem like a wall, and I decided to slam my head in to it. But by now I’ve improved. Instead of giving myself a metaphorical concussion, I’ve learned to avoid problems when it comes to writing, so now I just write a descriptive essay about literally the entire ocean, or I use a minecraft world as my wildcard for this project. Why try and fail at something you’re bad at, when you can just not? Another awful thing about my very first essay was the fact that I didn’t use a single contraction. Because I was told not to. It was an assignment, and there were directions, and I followed them. And it ruined my essay. I also only put one space after a period, and it was impossible to read, again because that was the rule. There are others too, especially the ones that involve which pronouns you can use and which you can’t, or how you’re not supposed to talk to the reader, like I’m literally doing right now. All of these rules hindered my writing, but by now I’ve grown out of these rules, and if a teacher wants to take points of for it, they can go right ahead. My writing is better now that I started ignoring conventions that weakened it, and that’s what matters to me.
I really tried to improve my writing throughout the year, which I hadn’t ever done before. If you really want to source any of my improvements, I suppose actually trying to improve helped. But why this year? I honestly have no idea. For some reason, in the middle of the year, I finally saw a path that would lead to real improvement in my writing, and I decided to take it, and honestly, I think it worked out. I would say that the best way to describe all of these changes is this: I decide to start viewing my writing as an art, and as with all other arts, I decided I would do it my way and no one else’s. The very existence of rules (even before taking into consideration that they’re objectively terrible rules) makes me want to break them in a creative way, or to comply maliciously, and create something that, while technically on topic, is simply not in the spirit of what was asked of me. I often create my best work when I am told to create something else, and so by applying my artistic philosophy to english (where they’re always telling you what to do) I’ve written some solid essays for once. I decided to cram all of the description of my improvements into this one section because I don’t want to talk about them in this portfolio. I would much rather give you the general overview, and then show you the results of my supposed improvements. So from now on, you can look for these changes, or you can not, but I won’t bring them up again.
So where do you go from here?
If i haven’t discouraged you yet here are some things you can check out:
This is a poem I wrote based on the descriptive essays we did in April and May. There’s a whole description about it, but the gist is that the Ocean is cool, and it’s both exciting and terrifying to not know what’s waiting beneath the waves.
Night Essay remix:
This String Quartet (with percussion) is based of the argumentative analysis essays we wrote about the Holocaust Memoir Night, and is meant to represent the contrasting change in Elie and the world around him throughout the story.
FAQ: Memealicious, well worth a look if you want to get to know me.
Wild card: You’re going to need Minecraft for this one. A small civilization and it’s rare contact with those of a foreign land.