My Pre-College Writing Experience

My formal education regarding the general form of writing papers began when I was enrolled in my first Honors English class, in the eighth grade. The class was immediately taught what a proper thesis statement looked like, what it was used for, and where to place it in a properly written paper. Another statement in the introduction was also required, explaining how we intended to support our thesis. We were confined to a five-paragraph format: an introduction, a conclusion, and three paragraphs; each of these three paragraphs was to be devoted to one form of evidence used to prove our thesis statement. By the time I had finished ninth grade, I had grown weary of the five paragraph essay, and rejoiced when I found that some papers I wrote required more or less than five paragraphs to complete.
My high school English teachers acknowledged the infamous essay format most students had been taught during their junior high years, but helped us to realize the vast expanse of English that was available to us. We were shown how to make a thesis statement as concise and to-the-point as possible, as well as shown organizational patterns that would most utilize the information and evidence we had gathered through research to persuade our audience. One of the greatest things I realized while writing papers in high school was that the purpose of the essay is what matters most, no matter how many paragraphs it may take to get your message across. A major theme in my Advanced Placement Language class during my senior year of high school was how to state a position and prove that position without losing an audience due to frequent wordiness. We spent much of the course revising each other’s essays and papers, trying to cut-down on unneeded information and explanations. This technique helped me to realize that though some phrases, words, and sentences may have been important to me because I was writing about something I felt strongly about, they may not have been important to the overall idea of the paper.
When looking back on the years I spent in junior high and high school, I believe I was repeatedly taught Murray’s theory of teaching writing as a process and not a product. My teachers seemed to care almost more about the quality of the way I developed my final draft than the quality of the final draft itself. Most of the assignments in my English classes were focused on the process of writing, which affects the way I write even today. My thoughts tend to dwell more on the way my ideas flow together rather than the way my words flow together. This leads me to the conclusion that I was taught the art of writing as a process and not as a product.