Hello, I'd like to have an argument.

My first (remembered) experience with writing arguments was in my AP Literature class when I was in 12th grade. I’m sure I’d had to write argumentative papers before this, but I’m also sure that I never fully understood the concept of an argumentative essay until this class. My teacher, Mrs. Reed, explained to us about thesis sentences and how to use specific examples to back up what we were trying to say about a certain topic. I think this was mostly engrained in my head so well because we practiced it ALL THE TIME! Not only would we have normal papers to do outside of class, but we also had to take the fun “You have one hour to read and analyze this poem/short story and make sense out of it in a well-thought-out essay” tests periodically. Those tests were in preparation for the dreaded and ominous AP test at the end of the year, and I still remember stressing out as the time clicked away and I scratched out line after line in my essays. It was a really useful tool in helping me to organize my ideas in a really fast way, though. This experience also helped me when I had to write papers for any other English class (I had two others my senior year. No, I am not a glutton for punishment…those were actually my preferred classes.) or History class or German class or any other class.
The one thing I noticed a lot with the “one hour” essays was that they all had the exact same structure. I would introduce the title and the author, tell a summary of how I was going to talk about them, give a thesis statement with three specific topics talk about those topics in three separate paragraphs, and give a half-hearted conclusion (half-hearted mostly because by the time I got to the conclusion I had little time and motivation to write left). So every time I had created the well-known and universally beloved 5-paragraph essay! Hooray! I think the one thing that I would have liked to learn more then is how to steer away from just writing the 5-paragraph form of an essay. I’ve noticed that I have had to tear myself away from using that technique time and time again in order to expand my essays or just make them more interesting. I did not mind putting them all in that form (though, now that I think of it, I am pretty sure both my teacher and those who read all the AP essays at the end of the year were probably REALLY bored with that technique…) especially since it was easy and, as I practiced it, it became second nature to me, but I still think that it would have been nice to know that there were other forms of essays floating out there in the universe.
Of course, another thing I learned about argumentative essays was how to procrastinate them until the last possible moment…which I also got really good at really quickly…but I’ll write about that later….like after I clean out all the dust in my keyboard, check my email (and Facebook) and play video games for several hours. Priorities, you know!