Personal Narrative: My Recovery

I’m actually kind of shocked I could write about recovery because it is a topic with a special meaning to myself. But, I found it easier to write about my own experience with a negative event this time, and I believe it is because I grew as a writer. I saw the value the personal testimony adds to a piece, and thus I could add my own story.

Within the first weekend of working on this topic, I knew I was going to need some help. After the first paper, I learned it is always beneficial to talk about concerns and issues with people who know about writing instead of friends or family members. As a result, I scheduled three appointments with the writing center. Each appointment helped a lot, and I believe it helped more this time around than last

because this was more of a real essay than the last.
My first appointment helped me create the introduction and the second paragraph, specifically the break between my introduction and the “ethos building second paragraph” (Andrew).

During this appointment, Andrew helped me start to see the “chit chattiness” of my paper, and we brainstormed ways to start eliminating it from my paper as well, though I only used one of these ideas in the end. The rest of the elimination I did by playing with sentences and even the words choice.

However, I did not quite get all the “chattiness” out of my paper by my second appointment, and my second helper pointed out this problem as well. During my second appointment, we mainly worked on my paper’s direction, and subsequently organization, because I had two directions: recovery not being possible and everyone experiences recovery. After the appointment, I finally had a stronger, focused direction to follow instead of two, weak ideas I was trying to

incorporate.
During my last appointment, Andrew and I talked about some minor errors in the paper. However, even from this minor meeting, and the other two, I learned a lot about my approach to writing. My first few drafts will be scatterbrained, because my ideas always, at least with the last two essays, never follow any outline I create. However, the main ideas are on the page, even if the order seems a little insane. After the first few drafts, the strongest points start to develop as the weak ideas fade, and then I tackle the organization. After I figure out the organization, I start focusing on my transitions and sentence structure. My writing method seems a little strange, even to myself, but, so far, this is the best option for me.
My sentences, much like my organization, is lackluster the first few drafts.

However, this is not because I am unable to write complex sentences, but because my mind is preoccupied with figuring out the ideas I need to put on the page. Once the ideas are on the page, however, it seems easy to go through and fix the sentence complexity. One particular good example is this sentence: “Furthermore, it seems to be human nature to imagine what recovered individuals were before entering recovery…” After writing this sentence, even though it was one of my first rewritten sentences, I knew I was capable of writing complex sentences, and I could leave my fictional voice to write in my academical voice. Though it still remains a struggle to not switch into my fiction

voice.
One section in particularly taught me that I can be very stubborn when it comes to writing, and it is not always a good thing. The paragraph that begins with “Lastly, life events, such as death” experienced major changes. Originally, this section was covered over three paragraphs to bring in a strong public resonance, and I was unwilling to give it up. Even after receiving feedback from Mrs. Miller to shrink the passage, I still thought I needed all of it, but I did move it towards the end as she suggested. It took my second writing center visit, an entire hour dedicated to organization, for me to accept cutting and drastically changing the entire section. While my stubbornness may be useful in some situations, I learned it is not useful in analysis papers, and perhaps most papers.