Writing is like walking on a bed of nails for me. When I am required to write in a course that has assigned topics, I feel trapped. I do not enjoy having my topics picked for me. I would rather sit down and type out life stories. I feel more at ease when I write free style. My biggest fear when writing is that I will not document something correctly or forget to document it all together and be accused of plagiarism. I also find it difficult to translate other writer’s words into my own. I usually try to relate the experience that the author is trying to convey into a real life situation of.
I am neither a tweeter nor a Facebook person. The majority of my writings are email and technical reports, which I know can be pretty dull. Prior to my current job, the majority of my writing was evaluation reports and military message traffic, both of which do not follow the standard English rules of sentence structure or punctuation. This has made my college experience a challenging one to say the least. I had to work extra hard in my first English class last semester.
I remember very few rules from my high school classes that I use in my writing today. I had to review a book of formal writing just to get through the first English class. I find that I tend to write run on sentences. An even more pronounced error is to end many of my sentences with prepositions.
When someone says the word writing to me the image that comes to my mind is my early days in Catholic school. The Nuns would smack my hand with a ruler every time I tried to use my left hand. They told me that it was not correct to use my left hand and that left handed writers were sloppy, because they smear ink all over the paper. This is not much of a problem today since most of my work is done on computers. One might find it odd that a person who seems to have such a problem with writing, would take online classes, given all of the work is writing. My career is demanding, I travel a great deal and I am home only two weeks a month. This makes traditional classes out of the question for me.
