Each and every person has their own individual writing techniques. To ask a group of students to write an essay together seems like a kind of funny project when you take this into consideration. A person per paragraph and collbarative and individual editing will never combine the essay to perfection. If you read the essay not for its content but its grammar and writing styles, it would probably sound rather funny.
I am doing the final edit of our first draft, and I can't wait to read the essay. I am excited to see what my colleges have come up with in terms of content, but I also want to see the differences in each paragraph. I am excited to see if we can make the writing flow with all our different writing styles, and I want to see if we can make it sound like a single person wrote the essay.
This project along with all the other's we've done in this course greatly impacted how I felt about writing courses. In high school we were only offered one writing course, and although I liked it, it was like a completely different program. In the previous English course I took we did only a few big assignments, maybe three or four. These included a movie review, a "publication booklet", and a couple others. We were also required to fill out a journal. We were required to do I think two pages a week, and we were given topics to write on. We were required to pick one topic from a sheet (topics such as "If I had a million dollars" or "What I would do if I was president") and at least one, sometimes three or four, opinionated journals on the news. We were required to write on news stories the teacher found interesting (weither you knew about it or not.) I took the course during the year president Obama was elected. Nearly every entry we wrote was about Obama. Before that course I didn't even know who the man was (Mostly because I could care less about politics).
My point is, although I enjoyed the course, I have a completely new perspective on what writing is really about. Having the freedom of writing our journal/blog on ANY topic we want (not overly used "what if" topics and news topics), and actually being able to express my creativity in my essays really opened my eyes to the English language. I find that this course has already give me a whole new perspective, and I feel as though by the end of it my writing experience will be greating changed.
