IV
Demonstrate and Apply Knowledge of Basic Skills
“This year you will be doing a lot of creative writing.” Mrs. Phelps introduced her class with at the start of my junior year. I had always been keen to free writing for the single reason that it was easy to fluff up and fabricate. As long as it was in MLA format and grammar was correct, I could not lose. I had discovered early on in my academic career that I was a decent writer; I could establish main points and a theme as well as apply proper grammar. It speaks for my writing that I was agitable to misusers of “there, their, and they’re” to say the least. The only criticism on writing prompts I would get were technical ones, like using apostrophes incorrectly or writing the number rather than spelling it. Yet, marked in red at the top of my first paper junior year was something I had not expected, nor seen before-- “Where is your voice?” My voice? I was not mute, so what kind of question was that? I thought about it all class period and looked for the flaw within the paper. All i had to work with was that obscure note and I thought about the question again and again-- I even began …show more content…
I hesitated to reveal how I felt in a time of havoc because I felt it put me in a position of vulnerability to the reader, who is that case was my judgemental, Honors English class. To display myself as frightened, nervous, and unstable seemed out of place in something I was writing about myself. I realized once I began rewriting my paper, although it felt wrong at first, that the details of my heartbeat in the panicked situation and how I considered hiding the debris gave the story a whole new angle. It was rich and colorful. It was my voice, my style. Writing was not burdensome when it was done like that. I loved the way my narrative paper sounded and I felt nearly ready to share it with my classmates the next