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Kara MacDonald
What's Wrong With Writing

An essay which focuses around everything that is wrong with writing seems as though it should be one of the easiest topics for a college student such as myself to consider. Writing is a task that has been lingering within our education for at least the last decade of our lives. In most cases, it was introduced to us as a colorful project to help stimulate our creativity and expression. Both are positive fundamentals which can be illuminated through writing, but are frequently overshadowed by negative requirements. There are many steps involved which require an extensive period of time to complete throughout the process of writing. People who come from different backgrounds often face challenges such as the use of grammar, wealth of vocabulary, or other elements which usually reflect personal levels of writing talent. Writing is a piece of work completed for the purpose of being shared with an audience, which often comes in the form of an individual reading to themselves. The time required for the process – considering all the rules of writing and communicating your ideas about a topic effectively to your reader – make this procedure quite the tedious task.

The time consumption of writing is a main concern that stresses out the writer. Before the start of any writing assignment, you are well aware of the time it will take to get all your thoughts together and then organize them into one large structured argument. Sometimes the issue can be having too many thoughts about a topic to fit into one whole body, and there’s not a reasonable way to make it work. The structure of a written piece can have requirements involving placement and length restrictions, which can affect the content of a paper. Completion of a writing assignment is difficult when you have to change certain thoughts you originally had in your previous drafts.

The process of rewriting drafts involves peer editing. Having your writing proofread means sharing your work with other people, and being vulnerable to constructive criticism. The fact that people have different opinions and thoughts about “good” writing plays a part in how effectively your paper can reflect your ideas to the reader. A large part of the writing process is being able to construct the paper in such a way that appeals to your reader. However, if the reader and writer represent different levels or talents, it can be a challenge to successfully communicate the writer’s thoughts. The proofreading steps serve as a helpful tool for improving a reader’s ability to analyze writing, or for the writer to take the received criticism with some value.

The different backgrounds we have as writers can also affect how well we can communicate our arguments if we lack certain skills necessary for acceptable writing. Writing tools taught in school can be lost or forgotten in a certain regional cluster of public schools or private institutions, which can immediately put the writer at a disadvantage. Lacking skills in grammar, spelling, or vocabulary, because it was not taught, becomes an issue for those people that try to perform at their best writing level.

Writing has proven to be effective as a means of self-expression. However, there can be changes made to the process or the rules of writing to make it a more attainable and less stressful task. The process of writing has come to be extremely time-consuming and restricting as rules of standard writing have expanded. As the expectations for the quality of writing grow, the rules change along with them. The act of writing comes in many forms, but most of us only know it in the form of required assignments and structures. We can work to find ways to overcome the restrictions, and figure out a way to produce a written piece that we enjoy sharing with our audience of readers in a positive way.

Kara 16:14, 2 May 2006 (EDT)