Sharing Brains

Its interesting thinking about how I, personally, learned to write essays because I’m not entirely sure if I ever really “learned” it (in the traditional sense) in one setting. I have always had the firm belief that my love and talent for writing is an indirect result from my love for reading as a child. Writing seems to come easier for those who are avid readers, in my experience, no doubt because in order to learn to write, one must have experience in the written language one is working with. Writing, in my mind, seems to be similar to the theory of how people learn to talk. Psychologists are not sure how much of speech stems from imitation and social reinforcement or simply “comes” innately when a person is born. On a different scale, writing seems to work much the same way. The chance for emulation must come at some point with the reading of other authors, but in some cases it seems that certain individuals just seem to “get it” and others don’t. I am speaking mainly about the elusive “flow” of writing and how even in the writing discipline, some authors craft beautiful sentences that convey feelings in ways that other, equally successful writers simply cannot do. However, when it comes to academic writing-like essays for instance- I firmly believe that anybody can learn how to write an organized, clear essay with a certain amount of effort. If this wasn’t the case than our writing center would be completely unneeded.
There are very few times in my life that I can consciously remember actually learning the step-by-step process of writing an essay. Past the actual writing of the individual letters (which I struggled with as a kindergartener- the “e”s really got me), I always seemed to take sentences from books that I was reading and mold them into a pattern that worked for me. It wasn’t until high school that my teachers really started differentiating between “good” and “bad” writers. In my AP classes that had required essay portions on the test, without fail my teachers on the first day of school would always hold up the model essay of perfection against the terrible essay that the graders all laughed at. This was the first time in my life that I was labeled as a good writer, instead of merely a good reader. I think this period of time too is the point where students who have qualms about the writing process develop them. If a student gets low marks in high school on his papers and doesn’t see any way of fixing them himself, he may decide that writing is just “not for him” and develop insecurities about the discipline. These insecurities carry over into college composition courses where the student is now forced to develop his writing skills whether he wants to or not.
For students who simply just don’t seem to “get” the writing process, I can completely empathize A comparable situation comes to mind as I think of my good friend in high school who excelled in the exact opposite subjects than me. He was the math and science whiz and I was the history and English nerd. Because of this, when it came to math, I had to turn to him for help in my struggle. It was frustrating for me that I just couldn’t understand the things that came so naturally to him, but on the other side he didn’t seem to grasp the terms and concepts in English that I did. Due to this, we had a running joke that if we ever “shared a brain” we would be able to get 4.0s. However, my point is that every person is good at something different, and because of this just because a student may not “get” writing, doesn’t mean that they aren’t genius in something else that I couldn’t even begin to understand. I love the Writing Center because it allows me to share something I am good at with somebody who needs the help. Who knows? Maybe some day the roles will be reversed, and then I will be the tutee learning something that appears completely foreign to me from the very same person that I helped in writing before.