Portfolio: Essay of Choice

Schizophrenia is something that I used to have for a long time. I had it all through high school and even up until I wrote the first essay in this class. This is something that you get from writing a rough draft and instead of writing your ideas properly you stress out, you cough out your sentences slowly. These sentences tend to not make any sense at all when they are read out loud. There is no flow to this kind of writing. I’m still working on this aspect of my writing progress but it is getting much better than it used to be.

I compare this problem as a basketball player in a game. Some basketball players are wound up, stressed out or just in a bad mood. These kinds of players do not perform very well. The players that are more successful are the ones that are relaxed, calm and because of this, they allow the game to come to them. I relate this to writing an essay because to write a good essay, you need to let the ideas and words come to you instead of trying to reach out and grab them. For example, I love to play basketball with my friends a couple times a week. I used to come excited to play but when I we would start playing, I would miss some shots. Eventually, I would get frustrated, play bad defense and it would turn out to be a bad day for me. Also, if I miss a couple of shots, I would lose confidence and hardly every shoot again for the rest of the game. Writing has the same effect on me. When I would look at every word and sentence while writing a rough draft, I would get frustrated when something wouldn’t make sense. I would even give up sometimes not even completing the assignment.

This quarter started out quite well. My first essay was not too bad. I had a few glimpses of schizophrenia but I got through it. The second essay was a little better but I noticed that I kept going back to my old habits a couple of times. The good thing about this is that by the time I was at the third paragraph, I was writing freely without schizophrenia. Also, after writing a rough draft, I do go back and look at my essays. I can relate this to what Tobias Wolff said, “Later on, you have to look back at your work with a very cold eye, as if you were editing someone else’s”. I can see now that I am doing better and better as the quarter rolls on.

My instructor Craig McKenney has described how to write a good essay and shown us examples of good and bad ways to writing. All writing is writing and there is no wrong answer is writing but there are some aspects to writing that sound better in an essay. For example, Craig explained how we need to have the flow in our essays. I learned about the flow and I am now currently trying to incorporate this into my essays. It is still a problem but I’m working on it. Writing with schizophrenia results in an essay with no flow. It has pauses and sentences out of place.

Schizophrenia is a problem among writer’s who are just beginning and even the writer’s that have not been shown the way to write a rough draft normally. I believe that the foundation of an essay is the rough draft and if you have a bad foundation consistently, then your rough drafts will be bad, consistently. This can be fixed during editing but it becomes a pain fixing the parts of your essay that could be very well done in the rough draft. It makes writing easier, fun and better sounding.