Reflection About Humor

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finish the task at hand with little thought or time put into it. When I was assigned my first paper in Writing and Critical Inquiry, assigned by my professor Darcy Mullen, I looked at the topic (experience paper: how humor has affected you as a writer) and said to myself “First off, how am I supposed to write about the influences of humor within my writing?” and “ This will just be a quick five page paper that I can easily get at least a B on just by bull-shitting about the effects of humor in my writing”. At first I thought the class would be just like any other class that I could half ass my papers and get by but later I came to the realization that I was in for of a writing experience more than I had originally thought; my first thought …show more content…

The first, and probably the thing that impacted my writing the most, was that I needed to be writing in eleven font, which was something I had never done before. Coming to the realization that writing in twelve font is a lot different than eleven font forced me to better manage my time, as it would take me a longer time to write, what used to be a quick, five page paper. The second thing that I learned from the first essay was that the grading was strict and that I actually needed to pay attention to the rubric, instead of just writing bull-shit to answer the topic of the paper that was assigned. Professor Mullen, after the first essay, informed us that she had an excellent “bull-shit detector”. After hearing this I realized that I would actually need to put effort and thought into my pieces of writing throughout the rest of the semester. The sense of the strict rubric grading put me into a position of stress and worry and I was thinking that I had finally been put into a position where I would be forced to out more effort into my writing; later I would find out that pushing through the hardships of writing the strictly graded papers, on topics I did not particularly, like would better myself as a student, not only in my writing class, but also in all other …show more content…

After figuring out that much effort was needed in order to be successful in my Writing and Critical Inquiry class I was then assigned another paper, later on in the semester, regarding humor as the “umbrella” for the topic of the paper. The assignment was to write a research paper and relate it in some way to the “umbrella” topic humor. Opposed to the first essay, I took my time and decided that if I wanted to become the best writer I can be during my time in Writing and Critical Inquiry, I would need to accept the fact that I needed to incorporate the idea of humor into my writing, instead of pushing it away and thinking how hard or absurd it is to write about humor. For the research paper I decided to research and write about how humor is widely used as a coping mechanism. Now that I had accepted that I could not do anything to change the umbrella topic for the class, I was able to write freely without making excuses and inadvertently stopping myself from creating a well-written piece of writing. For the research paper I followed the instructions on the rubric and put in more time and effort than I had in the first paper for the class. I received an 18 out of 20 points (a 90) on the research paper with my new perspective on how to write in Professor Mullen’s class,

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