The Red Convertable CM1120 #6

Tomorrow, we are writing our final in class essay. I could not be happier-in class essays make me stress out. I can write an essay in a little over an hour, not review it, and not feel even a slight sense of remorse over the fact that this essay will be graded on solely the thoughts passing through my mind as it is written. Then Caitlyn, what stresses you out about writing in class essays? You basically covered the entire process in that run-on sentence! Well, reader, what stresses me out, is the fact that at the end of this hour, whether you're done writing or not, this essay is going to be passed in. I would much rather lose marks on my untactful punctuation, my spelling, my poor sentence structure, and using conjunctions when we are asked not to, than pass in an essay with 3 and a half paragraphs rather than 5. Or even worse, not getting my entire point across by cutting parts out of the essay in the rush to complete it in such a short time frame! There is nothing worse, than having an essay that gives the reader a different view of what you are explaining, because in your haste you forgot one important little detail, a word even. If the reader is thinking something different than what you are portraying, it could throw off an entire piece of writing.

"'The Red Convertable', a lovely short story about two native boys on a reserve who buy a red convertible. Henry, the eldest is deployed to the war. Lymen, the poor younger brother, left home to fix up the convertible, easily earn money, and do whatsoever his heart desires, is devastated when he brother returns home three years later, and is no longer Henry. "

Now, reading that sentence, you may believe I am sarcastically portraying Lymen as a bad younger brother, for not caring what his brother went through, and taking for granted what he was left with for the last three years. But, when you return to read it, perhaps it was meant another way. How, you may ask? Well, as I emphasized in a previous post, my punctuation is terrible. Maybe that was a horrible run on sentence, and it did portray two separate ideas. Let's try re-writing that final sentence.

"'The Red Convertable', a lovely short story about two native boys on a reserve who buy a red convertible. Henry, the eldest is deployed to the war. Lymen, Henry's younger brother, remained at home, as his luck kept him from being deployed to the war. He fixed the convertible, easily earned money just as he always had, and did what ever his heart desired. When Henry returned from war three years later, he was devastated to no  longer  have the brother he once did."

Reading this, did you get a completely different view of what I was trying to portray? Honestly I am quite impressed I just wrote that off the top of my head. We should get a class to write essays and the next class to re-write the essays, just so we can produce such a higher excellence of the previous work we created.

To think of all the practice we are given in class, editing is probably one of our strongest skills as of right now. Writing something before the editing needs to be done, now that is something I personally need to work on! At that, my fellow CM1120 friends, I leave you with a thought to ponder.

Why is English-the language most of us learned to speak first-so difficult to write? Why is it the weakest point of some of our fellow English studiers? Why can we not be as good at writing as we are at speaking the language!