Ask anyone on the street who has ever had to write any kind of paper, academic or otherwise, and they will most likely share the same thought, writing is hard and sometimes annoying. In E. Shelley Reid’s Ten Ways To Think About Writing: Metaphoric Musings For College Writing Students, she debunks the myths we were all once taught about writing.
Shelley’s few rules that opened my mind.
In her article one of the myths she mentioned, being repetitive, was a topic I never thought about being used in the way she described it. She explains how repetition can be used as a form to keep the reader with you. Now, this does not mean that anything can be repeated. The central idea, the overarching point of the paper is what should be repeated. If the main idea of the paper is pointed out just once, it will cause the reader to get whiplash and may cause them to potentially miss the main idea.
Plain Jell-o vs. Fruit-Filled Jell-o
In this section, she used the example of eating plain Jell-O and fruit-filled Jell-O and painted a picture of what it felt like eating one over the other. I found it funny because, in my childhood, the only kind of Jell-O I ate was plain, but I still envisioned the picture she painted. She used this analogy to show what a good balance between examples and arguments. Writing only your thoughts, beliefs, and arguments is similar to serving plain Jell-O: it appears as though you’re accomplishing something, but it lacks actual content.
What’s in an Audience?
Now this section didn’t ‘open my eyes’ per se, but it did make me think of how I could explain writing to a given audience to my cousin, who constantly blows up my phone for help on her academic papers. I like that she went from a vague audience, asking for some money, to going to different specific audiences. You won’t write about needing money to your parents the same you’d write to a bank.
These are not new concepts to wrap my head around, but it is baffling to think that as I progress in college, I am actively unlearning a couple of myths learned throughout my high school days. I feel very much like I am looking behind the curtain, and having these thoughts like “why didn’t I understand this while in high school” but at least I am able to understand it now in college.
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