SWA #1

When asked to reflect on my best and worst writing experiences, I knew exactly which writing experience was my best. In the 9^th grade, my English teacher asked our class to write about any fictional story we chose. She told us we could write about sports, a mystery, superheroes, or anything else that we found interesting. My choice was easy. As a young kid I always loved super heroes. I grew up watching the marvel super heroes and Batman was always my favorite. So I took the fictional story idea and I ran with it. My story was about an average guy named Grant. Grant was tired of his somewhat boring and common every day life and wanted to change it to make a difference in the world. Grant was fairly wealthy as he owned all of the Subways on the east coast. He decided he would use the money he earned growing his Subway franchises to help fight crime. Because he did not possess any supernatural powers, he invented his own by creating glasses with laser and x-ray vision. He was also able to invent shoes that allowed him to run speeds of up to 70 mph, and he also invented a shirt that allowed him to fly anywhere. He called himself the Green Captain. One of his biggest fears was that America was becoming too fat. So, when Rico’s Tacos moved into town selling their greasy unhealthy tacos, the Green Captain felt he had to take care of the situation to save his town from their unhealthy ways. This was my favorite writing experience because I enjoyed fictional characters, particularly super heroes. In this case, I was able to make up my own superhero and use my imagination and creativity to develop a story that was unusual and out of the ordinary. I enjoyed creating a character that had the ability to do things outside of the normal realm of possibility. The paper was easy to write because of the enjoyment I had writing the paper. And even though when I first got the assignment and I thought 2000 words was going to be a lot to write, I ended up going over the word count and had to cut back on my paper to fit the word limit. The story came easy because it was about something that I enjoyed and enabled me to use my imagination and creativity. I found it to be a fun and exciting exercise.

My worst writing experience would have to be a paper I had to write in order to graduate from the International Baccalaureate program at Garner High School. The paper was for my Theory of Knowledge (ToK) class. Each student was given a topic to argue in a written essay. The topic I was given was, “How important the opinions of experts are in the search for knowledge?” I struggled from the beginning with this topic because it was not interesting. It was hard for me to connect to the exercise and to get excited about it like I was the fictional story I previously wrote about above. The paper also had to be 4000 words and at times while writing the paper I struggled to important things to include in the paper. When you do this you’ll find that the paper ends up not making sense, which mine didn’t make any sense whatsoever. So, I had to go back and edit the paper multiple times which made me disconnect from the paper even more. Looking back on the paper, I know that overall it was a positive experience because I had to force myself to stay focused on it. It really made me do the appropriate research and think about the topic I was writing about. After doing research, I concluded that the opinions of experts ultimately are only important up to a certain point. Their opinions are good to start ideas, but we as individuals must form our own opinions based off of our own research and our own finding for it to be valid to us.

I would have to say the paper that influenced me more was the ToK paper. The superhero story was more just for fun and to get us excited about writing. It really did not teach me much as far as how to format a paper correctly and do research to prove a particular point or position I was taking. The ToK paper was my first paper where I really had to do exstensive research and put forth a lot of work in order to complete it. The paper required me to do the necessary research on what I thought might be the answer to the questions and in the end my research actually changed my opinion. This paper I think will influence my future work. It was a learning experience that taught me that through research one can learn how to develop opinions and to be able to write a proper view on it.