Blog #3 - Affective Dimensions of Writing

In thinking about how I feel about writing I can affirmatively say that I am not much of a writer and prefer to express myself orally.  However, I have found some joy in writing, and on occasion, will do so.  Growing up I did not like writing at all.  Looking back at my high school writings, I notice that I was a pretty good writer though.  I understood the process and how to construct papers in a way that would help the reader understand what I was trying to present or argue.  Most the writing assignments that I did enjoy, I enjoyed because I was interested in actually doing the research and making the effort to write it.  I never really wrote recreationally growing up.  If it wasn't an assignment, I didn't write it.    Overall, I simply found writing uninteresting and couldn't sit long enough to actually write stuff.  However, I do have to admit being pulled into the whole note passing thing with my girlfriend in high school.  I did that only because my girlfriend did and expected me to respond.  When cell phones became big, we also texted often.  But, I have always preferred to have face to face or even phone conversations as opposed to writing.

Since high school and in my post-high school schooling experience I have found more intrinsic joy in writing.  When I say "more" I only mean that to say I like it a little more than I did before, overall I still don't really enjoy it.  While taking English 2010, I learned how to present a well written persuasive paper.  This semester-long experience was great for me.  I found out how much more engaged I was in writing the paper and I took the time to construct it in a way that I could actually persuade someone to believe in what I was writing.  It was the first paper that I didn't do most of the night before it was due; I wrote it throughout the semester making little changes here and there.  The subject, of course, was interesting as well, which created the greater desire for it to be well-written.  That class changed my perspective on writing.  Since that class, I have written many papers for my psychology classes and some for my education classes.  The psychology papers had themes that were always interesting to me and were given the same attention that the English 2010 paper was given.  I took greater conscious pride in my writing.  Yet, I find I do not write much recreationally still.  I have a Facebook that I do not update very often if at all and I currently don't write more that I need to for school.  However, I have found it beneficial for me to journal a lot more.  I enjoy occasionally sitting down and writing about how my life is going and my thoughts and feelings towards it.  The opportunity to vent through pages sometimes has a great effect on me and helps me cope with the small stresses of life.  This is as close to recreationally reading as I probably ever will.  But, I never really know what the future will bring for me and I tend to try and keep and open mind if the thought ever came to me to change.

As far as tying my experiences with writing to those opportunities I will give to my students, I will ensure that all my students are able to choose things they may be interested in so as to get them engaged in the writing.  Also, teaching how to write successful papers will also be part of my class.  Even though I am not the English teacher I know, for me, once I found out strategies for constructing a well-written paper, I became more interested in writing them.  I hope to be able to foster at least some joy in writing in my students enough so to give them to opportunity to have a good experience with it.  And I focus on the "enough so" part because I know, with my lack of joy in writing, I can only take some of the so far.