In order to reflect on my evolution as a writer over the last four years, I think it's best to first reflect on each year, and then attempt to determine trends. Therefore, this essay is split into two parts: (1) the facts and (2) my interpretation of the facts.

 

Part 1 – The Facts

 

Chapter 1 – Drinking from a Fire Hose

There is only one writing assignment I vividly remember from high school, and it was the first writing assignment assigned by my freshmen year English teacher. This one-page essay involved analyzing an excerpt from a book. But this wasn’t just any run-of-the-mill assignment. It was a trap. My teacher correctly determined that even if her two dozen students pooled their collective abilities, they would still struggle to write a semi-cohesive paper. In response to this, Ms. Belzyt created an assignment that everyone was doomed to fail. With no experience writing argumentative essays, the entire class scored poorly on the assignment, which was intentionally graded harshly. The result? Twenty-something fifteen year-olds realized that they knew pretty much nothing about writing. As my teacher anticipated, this created an urgency to learn. For me, this was a scary wake up call, especially since I knew the International Baccalaureate program involved writing in every class. Learning how to write felt like trying to drink from a fire hose; I felt overwhelmed by information with no confidence in my ability.

 

Chapter 2 – Master of the Universe

The second chapter of my writing evolution begins four years later. Despite entering high school with little in English 124, the required first-year writing course for LSA students. Standing atop my mountain of knowledge, I spent 3 hours a week in English 12 observing the other peons in my class haphazardly form mediocre sentences from mediocre words. I actually believed that scoring a 97% on an essay for an introductory English class meant that I had mastered 97% of the English language. In fact, I believed that the ability to use words like “synthesis”, “catalyzing”, and “duality” cemented my place among the greats. My pseudo-intellectualism led me into silly arguments that I actually believed at the time. For example, I wrote one essay about how plotlines in The Walking Dead shed light on some serious moral conundrums regarding selfishness and altruism. Here are a few highlights:

 

Consider the following question: is it morally justified to help free-roaming prisoners whose crimes are unknown?... Although many would argue helping convicts is immoral, the presence of zombies challenges this idea… What doesn’t matter is that I can objectively answer this question. What does matter, however, is that I consider the implications of the question in regards to my moral self-awareness. What can this grey area teach me?... From this episode, I learned that inner morality has little to do with obeying the law... Essentially, just because someone has acted “wrongly” in the past doesn’t mean they can’t be more altruistic that a lawful citizen… These are all ideas, gained from my post-episode forum analysis, that have increased my moral self-awareness.

 

Granted, the paragraph above looks sillier than it actually appeared in context, because I pulled out the sentences that didn’t sound pretentious. However, this doesn’t change the fact that I did actually believe my own pseudo-philosophical babbling. In addition to my inflated academic writing ego, I didn’t even realize that other writing genres exist outside of formal argumentative essays. This perfect storm of delusion left me with enough perceived knowledge to make up for my lack of actual knowledge.

 

Chapter 3 – Oops

After English 124, I took English 225: Academic Argumentation, which served as another ego-boosting argumentative writing class. My artificially high writing confidence remained unscathed—until I decided to take English 221: Writing Outside of the Classroom. I knew from reading the class description that this course involved some poetry, but I didn’t realize until the first class that the course writing involved almost exclusively poetry. To put this into perspective, I’ve never really written poetry before. However, most of the poetry writing involved “imitation”, or mimicking of current poets, so I didn’t feel entirely lost. With this being said, I didn’t even understand how to judge good poetry, and felt embarrassed sharing the poetry I wrote. With this being said, the class didn’t completely shatter my confidence as a writer… until I tried to write a short story.

 

The assignment involved adapting an existing work into a different time period or setting. I choose to tackle one of my favorite books: Grendel by John Gardner. If you’re not familiar with the book, it’s the story of the lonely monster from the Beowulf story. And that’s pretty much how I felt trying to write my 21st century adaption; I felt like a lonely monster. Up to this point, I’d specialized mostly in academic writing. Trying to learn how to write a story felt like I was a robot trying to understand human emotion. The worst part? I felt so embarrassed by my attempt that I shuddered at the thought of seeking out feedback from anyone other than my professor.  The notion of Jake Marples as a ‘good writer’ waned.

 

Chapter 4 – I have no idea what I’m doing

My confidence hit rock bottom when attempting my Gateway course’s remediation project. The project involved transforming my academic essay about the financial and cultural dangers of investment banking into a satirical news video similar to those from The Daily Show. Only five people have seen this project: myself, my girlfriend, my parents, and my gateway professor. The idea of writing and executing pre-planned jokes made me incredibly nervous, and I even removed the YouTube link from my ePortfolio after my gateway semester ended. At the time, I felt completely out of my element, and can’t remember a time at which my confidence has been lower. Looking back, I’m still very proud of the work I did—especially using iMovie and a green screen—but I’m eager to jump back into this genre and gain more confidence.

 

Chapter 5 – One Step at a Time

Chapter five is the present. Throughout all my experiences in the minor, I’ve learned that writing exists in many different forms and genres. Although “multi-modal” sounds similar to a buzzword like “synergy”, it really isn’t a meaningless filler word. After taking a step back, I’ve been able to more accurately scope these different genres. My confidence as a writer has certainly increased slightly when compared to chapter 4, but I’ve realized that I have a long way to go. My evolution as a writer hasn’t been a beautiful, linear curve. I’ve learned that Unfortunately, I will never really reach the writing skill level I thought I had in chapter 2. However, I now understand the size of the writing elephant, so I can begin to approach the overwhelming task of eating it.

 

Part 2 – Interpretation of The Facts

 

In the first draft of this essay, I confidently used the Dunning-Kruger effect to model the five data points above. Here’s an excerpt from this draft:

 

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes the disconnect between what people think they know with what they actually know. Driven by a lack of perspective, this force of ignorance in the world stems from “illusionary superiority.” In other words, beginners to certain disciplines are often blissfully unaware of all the things they don’t know, which leads them to overestimate their perceived knowledge or skill. On the other hand, those with intermediate skill can more accurately scope the knowledge they don’t have in a specific field, and therefore may underestimate their ability. In a nutshell, I believe this relationship describes my evolution as a writer—the five major points on this delusional journey are outlined below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But in revising this essay, I've started to question: is this model fair? The y-axis measurements are relatively accurate, as I'm able to remember my relative confidence as a writer over each year without much trouble. But what about the x-axis? How am I defining knowledge? Can knowledge even be defined? If it can be defined, can it be measured? Is it an oversimplification to assume more knowledge has consistently increased over time?

 

As much as I love the idea of modeling the disconnect between my perception of knowledge and actual knowledge, I can't put forth this model in good faith without conceding its accuracy. In reality, when it comes to writing, I can easily think of five different ways to define knowledge just off the top of my head:

 

1) Familiarity with genres (breadth of skills)

2) Ability to write in a specific genre

3) Technical ability (sentence structure, sentence fluency, etc)

4) Organizational ability to map out concepts

5) Ability to get good grades in writing classes

 

If I did my best to estimate my historical knowledge under these definitions, and mapped all on one chart against the confidence Y-value, it might look like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In reality, the only X-value I can use with confidence is time. In this case, the original chart I mapped out would be correct, just with an altered x-axis:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately, though, this adjusted model doesn't really relate to the Dunning-Kruger effect at all. In fact, it really just illustrates that my writing confidence increased, then decreased, and now has started to increase again. But this gets me thinking: how can I be extremely confident or lacking confidence about my ability as a writer if I can't even measure my ability? This is the key takeaway for me: I can't.

 

 I think it's reasonable to assume I'm not getting significantly worse over time, but it's very hard to actually track my improvement given the varying definitions of knowledge and the inability to measure most of those. So moving forward, I'm going to do my best not to irrationally label myself a 'good' or 'bad' writing under circumstances that make me feel good or bad. It's actually quite a liberating feeling, to consider myself just a writer, as opposed to a "___ writer". And that's not say improvements can't be noticed, it just means they shouldn't be monitored obsessively. My evolution as a writer isn’t perfectly correlated with my writing confidence, but it can’t really be comprehensively measured either. As my confidence increases and decreases, I just need to focus on developing my skills through exposing myself to many genres and seeking out feedback from others. I won’t be able to track and compare progress over time with confidence, but I’m ok with this.