In my high school, we were taught a specific way to write. It was a very oriented curriculum in how we wrote our papers, at least for me it was. I believe I was taught a basic and boring way to write that just enabled me to pass the class but not really help me learn. Like I was never taught how to write with my feelings or to dive deeper into specific subjects and really explore and pull apart its aspects. I always wrote in that specific boring way for every paper because I thought that was what the teachers wanted and that if I would go outside these lines I would not do well in the class. But what’s strange is that I have never seen this practice; I’ve only assumed this because they were the teacher and I was the student, so who was I to go against what they say.
Now that I think about it, this is probably why I was only in standard writing classes instead of honors. It’s actually really sad because I was never personally exposed to write any differently than what I was taught and so I never went out and sought after ways of how to improve my writing.
This was the case until I came to college and took a WRD 102 class with Professor Eric Plattner. He showed me how to write incredible essays that have greatly improved my writing abilities.
Writing in high school really is an odd experience looking back. The topics are almost always narrowly defined in order to avoid students getting off the rails and writing about something that’s not at all connected to class, and the assignments where there is an ‘open’ topic option is typically defined as well. It often goes that you’re free to choose a topic as long as it’s from a list of already planned ideas. My experience at DePaul has been helpful as well, as various WRD professors have given input into my writing, criticizing it when needed and otherwise giving a helpful hand in the process. I hope that one day high schools and their teachers devise a better way to instruct students so that their assignments are not so rigid, that they can stretch their wings with different types of writing assignments.