Academic Integrity: tutoring, explanations, and feedback — we don’t complete graded work or submit on a student’s behalf.

Writer\'s Autobiography: Respond to each question in detail. Your responses will

ID: 3465556 • Letter: W

Question

Writer's Autobiography:

Respond to each question in detail. Your responses will help us begin to discuss writing this semester. This response should be a minimum of 200 words.

What kinds of experiences with writing in general have you had as a student in high school or before now in college? Consider what subjects you wrote about, types of writing you did, audience and purposes for writing, approaches and assignments you liked and disliked, how you felt about it all.

What kinds of things do you now write or have you liked to write outside of school?

How do you get ideas or inspiration for writing? How do you get started?

What conditions (time, place, etc.) for writing seem to be best for you?

How much do you revise as you write? After a first draft?

What do you think makes writing good? What does one need to become a good, successful writer? Can everyone be a good writer?

What are strengths and weaknesses in your writing?

Who are your favorite writers? What do you like about their writing.

Explanation / Answer

As is often practiced in high school, between tiffin breaks and storytellings, the experience of writing generally included essay answers to direct questions. They would rarely be subjective and would comprise common learning which generally occurred from a habit of textbooks. A student would write facts and figures on several subjects including sciences, and social sciences. One would write about the size of the earth, and the dates of world wars. There was a dearth of analyses. There would mainly be a singular body of the audience - the teacher or the evaluator. This harnessed a very particular style of writing that would be academic and subjective to an understanding of the matrix based on how the teachers would evaluate a paper.

Being away from school surely allows one to widen the horizon of thoughts and write on simply anything. Although lessons from school help us tame the jungle of thoughts, it allows us to sow a variety of seeds for imagination. I sometimes, however, find myself at a lack of topic to write about. It only suggests that I am not surrounded by a commonality of thoughts but have given myself space to think. This process of thinking breeds powerful imagination and creative critique. It is not a critique of literature alone, but a critique of all that's around us. I often start writing at the oddest of times - at times at 3 o' clock in the night, and at 3 o' clock in the afternoon at others. Without a schooling guideline, there seems nothing that may be a suitable condition for a writer. Inspiration strikes me at the oddest. Yet there are the four walls of my room - the only four walls that allows me to organize my thoughts. And then the first draft is done. A draft may be revised an indefinite number of times. In most cases, it is constantly revised even after editions of publishing. And this makes the writing mature, more sensitive, and in laymen terms, "good". It is a personal belief that if anything can be literature then any form of literature can be good. It doesn't matter if it's high or low literature, an authors sensitivity is his best feature. This captivates his audience and fuels his desire. Bukowski's words are considered a bold distraction in the field of high literature yet they are so sensitive that they capture the raw human essence. On similar terms, Dan Brown may be a writer of historical fiction, but to his readers, his research and style stand out.

For me, a writer is made up of both strengths and weaknesses. It is how true he is to them that stands him out. My strengths usually indicate my love for details, and weakness is a common laziness. To establish a ground for both to co-exist becomes my major challenge and my exotic own literature.