I don't use Post-it notes to write papers

I don’t remember exactly how I learned to write, but I know it had a lot to do with reading. If I never had a desire to read, I would have never had a desire to write, or when I had to write, I wouldn’t have cared about it. I remember always enjoying reading. I used to read instead of watching television, which is not always the case today. In elementary school, reading and writing always seemed to me to be the same subject. We would read a story, and then write a story. And since I cared about reading well, I cared about writing well. I remember telling a boy in my class that knife started with a k and not an n. We argued for a couple of minutes until he asked the teacher who told him that knife did start with a k. I liked paying attention to those types of things – spelling, grammar, punctuation – I loved it.
It wasn’t until high school that I really cared about developing my writing style and technique. In my sophomore history class, I learned to write a five-paragraph essay. This didn’t help me write beautifully, but it taught me the basic things to include in a paper for school. Once I knew what to include in a school paper – thesis, topic sentences, conclusion – I could experiment a little and work on developing my ideas and language. I don’t really remember learning anything useful in my English classes, however. One of my teachers wanted me to write blurbs of ideas on little post-it notes and stick them on an huge sheet of paper to figure out how to organize my paper. I think she called it a post-it outline. I thought this was ridiculous, so I didn’t do it. Instead, I wrote my outline on a sheet of notebook paper, and if I didn’t like what I had, I’d erase it and rearrange it. It worked out just fine, and I got an A on the final paper. Most of my other teachers thought it would also be a good idea to learn from other students through peer editing. I thought this was also ridiculous. I would always end up editing someone’s paper who didn’t really know what they were doing, and I’d spend the whole time making their sentences complete.
Looking back, I’m not really sure how I learrned to write. I think it was a combination of reading a lot, paying attention to the elements needed in writing, and then figuring out what I liked and what worked for me. A lot of what I learned was self-taught. I just took some of what I learned in school, then thought about what would sound good and tried my best because I was afraid of bad grades.