Question: How has my experience been different writing in college as opposed to high school while continuing to improve as a writer?
General answer: In high school, my writing was very constricted to the "five paragraph" format which caused me to feel very limited what I could express within my writing. However, now reading about a vast variety of different authors and seeing their writing style really opened my vision to see that writing can be unique in a way that allows you to get your points across in different methods as shown by Sacks and Roach. Moving forward, I'd like to use their writing styles which I have already and I've seen a great improvement in my writing process.
Oliver Sacks and Mary Roach both challenge the concept of the common “five-paragraph essay” in their writing which have inspired the type of writing I tend to do from now. Personally, utilizing their approaches to writing in my own writing has strengthened my abilities by not limiting my ideas to a quick three paragraphs. Even though they are not necessarily writing essays, rather narratives, they still do not format their writing such that the “first paragraph, warn your audience that you are planning to make .. three points … After that, use the fifth paragraph to remind your audience of the three points you just made” (Bernstein/Lowry 214). Instead, they write in a story-telling and descriptive way.
Specifically, Sacks uses imagery within The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat to evoke a connection between the reader and the situation as this is not an easily understood situation. Sacks writes “he saw faces when there were no faces to see…in the street he might pat the heads of water hydrants and parking meters, taking these to be the heads of children” (Sacks 3). It is evident that Sacks may have strategically used hydrants in comparison with the heads of children as they are small with a capped cover symbolizing a child’s head. Nonetheless, the main idea is that Sacks chose hydrants over a bench as it is most closely similar to young children in terms of appearance making it easy for readers to visualize this scene in their minds while following the story.
- Personally, I like to/have started more to use descriptive words to create an image in my reader's mind to allow them to follow along more effectively.
On the other hand, Roach approaches her writing in a more descriptive way that enhances comprehensiveness while she also demonstrates cognitive processing by “revealing genuine expertise” (Miller). Roach goes on to explore the little details that goes into making military uniforms by examining the smallest components on their uniforms like “a cloth flap called a button placket, which covers the buttons so they don’t get chipped” (Roach 31). Compared to Sacks, here Roach goes deeper to understand the necessity to ensure that every part of a soldier's uniform needs to be able to camouflage and keep them safe under all conditions without anything falling out and leaving a clue that they’ve been there.
- Personally, I have rarely dug deeper with concepts in writing which may have made my writing vague and boring. However, Roach inspires me to dig deeper into something that is interesting but something other people are also curious about.
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