In every English class I’ve been in, I’ve always had trouble with writing. Every paper or essay I would turn in would always seem to come back with what was barely a passing grade. I did everything I was supposed to and followed the basic structure of writing papers step-by-step: I had outlines, rough drafts, I didn’t skip a single thing on my way to the final draft. With the less-than-ideal grades I was receiving, I did everything that I could do to try and boost my grade, everything from starting the essay the night I got the assignment to looking up words in an online thesaurus. Nothing seemed to help. Even when I would stay back after class and ask my teachers for help, they would do their best to help me but nothing they said ever seemed to click. I eventually just came to the conclusion that I just wasn’t a good writer, and I stopped putting as much effort into my writing.

In eleventh grade, as I was starting to take standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT, I was still not putting as much effort into writing. This carried over into my testing efforts. I had gone into the standardized tests expecting low scores on the writing sections and essays, because that’s always what happened to me in my classes. When I started to get the scores back from the tests, I was shocked to find out that I had fantastic scores on the essays. And these were essays that I had almost no time to write, and no time to prepare for the prompt. This wasn’t just for one test, this happened on all the standardized tests I took. At first, I had no idea what I did that caused the dramatic difference in the scores I received in class and the scores I received on the standardized tests. But, as I thought about it more and more, the one thing I did different on the standardized test was that I winged it way more than I wing essays for school. What I realized from this was that maybe I’m a better writer than I always thought, and I just needed to approach essays and papers differently than I had in the past.

So, what I did was I started to approach essays more loosely than I had been doing. Instead of strictly adhering to the process of making an outline, rough draft, and so on, sometimes I would just jump straight to the essay and work backwards to the outline when I had part of the essay done. Because my new approach went against the approach I had been taught since elementary school, my English teachers weren’t the biggest fans, but they let me continue using it because it started to work well for me. My writing scores began to improve over my junior and senior years in high school, just because I found a different, better way to write my papers and essays.