High School Writing Style Analysis

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From birth to death, as a human, I learn, re-learn, and am taught again how to engage in specific, everyday life functions. Every individual has their own style, this goes for writing, drawing, singing, dancing, the list goes on and on. All throughout my life, I have been taught how to write and what style of writing is ‘acceptable’. This essay will challenge what I was taught about writing in high school. I will relive the horrifying days of the five-paragraph structured essay. When I think back to writing in high school, vivid flashbacks occur of trying to write how the teacher wants, not how I wanted to write. Now is my chance to write how I want to write!
For a moment, forget about the countless rules, and allow your mind to envision …show more content…
Writing has evolved through time, leaving writers with styles and genres to choose from, adapt, and make our own. In Verlyn Klinkenborg’s, “Several short sentences about writing”, along with Paul Graham’s, “The Age of the Essay”, the reader is taught to ‘notice what you notice’, while avoiding the rules that were taught to us students during high school. As a writer, I must forget what I was taught previously, as, “Most of the received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but harmful” (Klinkenborg, Prologue). Klinkenborg reminds the me that everything I, as a college freshman, know about writing, is wrong. He tells the me to forget the five-paragraph essay, and to throw away that moldy old double-stuffed Oreo that has been rotting in my mind for as long as I can remember. If I didn’t write in my own style, my essay would be merely a statistic, thrown into a pool of essays that follow the same old …show more content…
If writing was trouble-free, I wouldn’t need to write rough-drafts before the final product is ready to turn in. What was taught to me during the past four years of high school was not primitive or natural, meaning it doesn’t fit into Alva Noë’s definition of being ‘organized’. Noë defines being ‘organized’ in his story, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, as being, “primitive and “natural”; they are arenas for the exercise of attention, looking, listening, doing, undergoing; they exhibit structure in time; they are emergent and are not governed by the deliberate control of any individual; they have a function, whether social or biological or personal. And they are (at least potentially) pleasurable,” (Noë, 6). Being taught to write how the teacher wants me to, leaves writing as an ‘unorganized’ activity, whereas writing freely allows for my writing to be an ‘organized’ activity. Following rules and regulations as to how I should write, breaks Noë’s notion, as my writing would no longer be categorized as ‘emergent’, as it was governed by my high school teacher’s writing lessons. When I put my fingers on the keyboard, or my pen onto paper, words start flowing in and out of my mind, making it clear to me as to what I feel passionate about and what is important to the moral of my essay. When I am writing to satisfy a teacher, I am no longer writing for myself, nor am I writing to my greatest
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