Events:
- My first semester at college, when I gave in my paper for my Justice and the Individual class, the professor had circled every single grammatical error I had made. I never felt so dumb in my life, I felt silly correcting commas, adding semicolons, run-on sentences. I had just finished high school and they never complained. But hey this was college and you were expected to know details to their minimum.
My twelve years of school were finally over. I had never felt so excited to graduate. I was planning, and I mean step by step what my future would look like. I envisioned myself and thought ” wow, by the time I’m 21, I’ll be graduating out of college and go right into a new job” …I sighed in amazement.
four years later and I am currently in my sophomore year.
But let’s rewind to that splendid moment when school was out but the real phase of being an independent college student kicked in. Confused as anybody is during their freshman year, I was moving up, down, left and right just as I was told in order to be ready for the new semester, classes … checked.
I enrolled in an interdisciplinary studies program which consisted of taking three different types of writing courses during the semester. One of these was Justice and the Individual. I thought it was fascinating, the name just came to me as a declaration, it scared me but also excited me. I had no idea what I was going for. Since I can recall I’ve always been up to explore, no matter what it’d be, I’d take the risk of experiencing it. Optimistic about myself, like an enthusiastic child, I walked into that classroom filled with students, trying to be the best version of myself. A few lessons in, I was comfortable with the material, nothing too complicated to understand. We even took a field trip to a penitentiary all the way in Pennsylvania. A few more lessons in and my comprehension of the material seemed to be off. I knew I had to invest more time in it, so I fixed my problem. For every reading, I carried a red pen, a black pen, and my iPad. While I read, apart from taking notes I circled any word that I didn’t know the meaning of and right away looked it up on my Merriam Webster app. Problem solved. Group presentation day came and I had to go in front of the classroom, with all of those eyes staring right at me, I really tried to get at least one syllable out. A problem that I am still working on. (Currently taking a speech class)
But my main issue was the day that I received my draft paper back. We were supposed to write an essay about how justice played out in an individual’s life. A broad enough topic that I learned to narrow down in terms of the kinds of individuals that might be affected by this system. To my surprise, my concern wasn’t the content of the paper, as much as was a number of grammatical errors my professor had circled and underlined for me to correct. As I turned each page, the amount of red ink just seemed to increase, and I couldn’t help to think about how stupid my paper looked compared to my classmate next to me. I felt ashamed and at the same time really frustrated for the fact that they were simple mistakes that had ultimately affected my writing. Yet, I battled to understand why make such a big fuzz, because the paper seemed to have had been inspected to its core for any mistake. Back in high school, I don’t ever recall having to go back and correct my work so much for grammatical errors. and hearing my professor say that I needed to “go to the writing center for help” left me feeling in distress. I’ve always succeeded in my past writing assignments, in fact, English had always been my favorite subject. Why did I suddenly have to go back to remembering what I’d learned to what seemed to have ha been in elementary?
Walking into the writing center felt humiliating. I didn’t even want to keep looking at my paper, for the first time in my school years, I felt like a failure as a writer. I couldn’ get a hold of this term called “Academic writing”. I considered it to be writing that good writers form with the use of fancy words. Yet, as it turns out, it seems to be that the term needs a whole class dedicated for itself. I asked myself then, What had I been writing back in my high school? could my teachers then really have had cared less? But as Lennie Irvin describes in his essay, What Is Academic Writing? pg. 8, “Academic writing is always a form of evaluation that asks you to demonstrate knowledge and show proficiency with certain disciplinary skills of thinking, interpreting, and presenting.” I want to add stress to this last word because that is where I found that my problem lied. For the most part, the way in which my paper was presented to the reader made it invaluable as a piece to qualify as academic. And although it may seem like a mistake of last-minute importance, without knowing how to correct it could end up affecting my entire piece of work no matter the quality of intellectual points I may have made. I would like to use the analogy that Irvin, (pg. 10) makes when comparing the stance of a college student to that of a courtroom. One must act as the lawyer who’s laying out the case for your jury(the readers). providing them with all of the necessary facts supported with evidence, in order to make a convincing case. According to Irvin, it captures two important things about academic argument “1. the value of an organized presentation of your “case” and 2. the crucial element of strong evidence” . while I couldn’t agree more with this statement, I would also like to add this scenario. Suppose that the lawyer has all the substantial evidence needed to back up his claims, but while presenting his argument he fails at making a compelling argument due to his choice of language in a way that can almost confuse his jury.