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Benjamin Culkin!

Mrs. Winter!

English 101 T01!

2 September 2014!

A Working Title!

!! Starting a paper is hard. Its hard to find a good introduction that will give you

plenty of space to write a paper off of, without becoming an unwieldy monster that takes

most of a page. This fact, along with multiple others, are all things I knew about writing

before my senior year, but never really dwelled on. My senior year in high school

however, I was given an assignment that hammered this in. It was the sort of

background assignment that was assigned at the beginning of the school year, was

periodically touched on, and then expected to be done and ready at the end of the

school year. The assignment was called the Senior Memory Book and was a trip

through our school career. It also happened to take the form of ten to eleven one-page

papers. Even though it caused me quite a bit of trouble and stress at times, I feel it

taught me several important things. Namely, it helped me get better at writing about

myself, reinforced several writing skills, and started me on the path to just doing

something, instead of endlessly procrastinating and doing things in a rush of mad panic.!

! I was not good at writing about myself. Im still not good at it, but at least Im not

as bad at it as I was. I found out just how bad at this I was on the second of the papers -

My Dreams - or something to that effect. This was one of the most difficult ones to

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start, and wasnt easy to keep going either, because a lot of my dreams are either

ridiculously unrealistic things that I simply dont feel comfortable sharing, or so mundane

that there isnt really much point in sharing them. However, after about the third or fourth

try of trying to do the paper with the mundane dreams that sort of sputtered out, I

realized something. !

! Sure the mundane dreams may be as dry as a desert, and the unrealistic ones

are unpublishable both for their blatant unrealism and other things, but mixing tiny bits

of the unrealistic ones into the mundane ones makes them interesting enough to write

about while still keeping them good for writing about. So, in short, if you have trouble

writing about something, try mixing tiny bits of something else in. It worked for me at

least, and got me through that paper and one or two others.!

! Another useful thing I learned, writing skills are one of those things that can

always be improved, and the best way to do that is to write. Having to write multiple

shorter papers on semi-related topics semi-frequently instead of one or two big ones on

unrelated subjects clustered together makes it so that you focus less on the sort of skills

that make it easier to simply start writing small pieces, and more on the ability to fill in

the bones of larger subjects. To torture a metaphor, its like an architect whose training

is almost solely on building skyscrapers. Sure, they look pretty in the skyline, but too

many of them and it takes the impact out of them. However, writing small papers is like

building a bunch of houses of varying designs. They may not visually look as

impressive, but they are often useful enough to justify the (usual) exponential increase

in difficulty as size goes up.!

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! To start on probably the most useful writing skill I learned, there really isnt one.

Sure, there are a handful of things that both discovering and learning how to make use

of will make writing easier, and the end results better, but there is no silver bullet.

However, that doest mean there arent plenty of bronze bullets, which when used in

high enough amounts, will work just as well as a single bullet. !

! One of these is to have a clear idea of where you are going with an idea before

you start on it, or at least some degree of knowledge on what you want down the road,

so you can set it up now. I myself still need to work on this some, but at least knowing

that you arent good at something is better than not knowing about the something at all,

or even worse, thinking you are good at something you are bad at.!

! Getting off of the subject of writing tips somewhat, I had to learn not to

procrastinate on the papers, because our teacher decided she was going to do

something different. Instead of having them all due at the end, she had them spaced out

throughout the year, with them being collated and trimmed into suitable form for

presentation by us. I still procrastinated on a lot of the earlier ones, but I managed to

clean it up as time went on. I did not want to miss out on some of the fun senior

activities either because I had work I needed to do, or had too low a grade from not

doing the work.!

! Overall, the senior memory book was an enjoyable assignment, or at least it is

looking back on it and all of the work it took. At times it wasnt much fun, but there is

nothing that is not. It did teach me several valuable things. One, write about yourself,

not other people, because you can write yourself entirely as you want to, and not have it

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be considered out of character to do so. Two, practice writing skills. Without then, its like

trying to succeed in a class by doing the bare minimum, and expecting to do well at it.

Third and finally, things need to be worked on, not just contemplated for an eternity.

Doing that will get you nowhere fast.

! !