My Writing Process

Every essay begins with a blank stare into space, an exasperated sigh, and the inevitable thought: what am I going write about? Or at least that is how they used to begin, and this process may have continued for hours, or even days, with each time I sat down determined to write nothing would make it on the paper. This became a major roadblock in my writing process, because every essay took an unreasonable amount of time thinking about how to approach this topic, typing sentences out and the deleting them. Finally, an idea would come and I would begin to write, the words would finally spill out onto the paper. The terrible experience writing forced me to figure out a new way to brainstorm my essay weeks before the essay was assigned.
In high school, I began to ask teachers for writing prompts prior to reading the book, so I could have a longer time to think about my approach to the essay. This engaged me in the book

I regarded outlines as childish before, but it wasn’t until I started an essay with it that I understood its effectiveness. I realized why it was such a basic and important piece in the writing process through my own experimentation with it. I have used this process ever since, and each essay is far easier to write when I already have basic ideas on paper. This anecdote shows a clear progression from a disorganized to methodical writer, and is very similar to the process that I developed through this course. Only this time, my disorganization was in the amount of repetition present in the writing process. Along the track of repeating writing and revising essays to resubmit them, I learned many valuable tricks to help become a better writer, something that I desperately felt I needed coming into UMass. From my first unit to my last, there is a very clear progression of my methodical nature’s development, best illustrated in a comparison between Unit 3 and Unit