On Writing

 Maria sits down at her desk after getting back from school and decides to tackle her writing assignment first out of her plethora of homework assignments. She opens her computer and sees that it is a short-and-sweet one-page paper. She puts her headphones on and puts instrumental study music on Spotify because too many times she has played her regular playlists and finds herself accidentally typing out the lyrics instead (talk about unconscious plagiarism!) Instead of getting stuck thinking of her introduction, she gets straight to the thesis to outline her body paragraphs and evidence, just like all of her high school English classes trained her to do. She sometimes has to stop her flow of words to think of the word that's on the tip of her tongue or to find a synonym for a word she's been overusing. She knocks out the body paragraphs as systemically as a robot given a code to produce essays for the masses. Once she reaches her conclusion, she restates the thesis worded in a different manner and writes a thoughtful conclusion. Once she circles back to her introduction, she realizes she still hasn't come up with an enticing hook or interesting fact that is always demanded in these essays, because of course her evaluator and audience need to be interested in reading her paper with a "Did you know...?" before deciding to read more. She ends up going with a generalized statement that is loosely relevant to the content of the essay and calls it a day. 

An area I feel I could get better at in my writing is finding a way to introduce my papers that is more natural and less forced through common hooks. Also, I hope to elaborate more on the body paragraphs and not only write in the format taught: claim, quote, commentary. In terms of AP English grading, I want to work on getting the sophistication point!

The two pieces of advice I found most useful in Joe Bunting's guide were numbers three and seven. I have always viewed essays as a tedious way of showing an argument with examples lined up in a very cut-and-dry format that has been drilled into our heads since the beginning. However, seeing that there is the liberty to have fun with it and express ourselves, in a formal manner, will hopefully not only make my future essay writings more enjoyable but also produce better papers. Furthermore, advice number seven, answering the questions "why" and "how", is an aspect of the essay that I always struggled with, in terms of where to insert and how to answer. I hope to explore that more hopefully in future writings!