Case Study

As I look over my writing from the past five years of my college career, I find myself most pleased with the work I did for my English 230 course. In this course I was directed toward the aspect of drafting and revision, a technique that I strayed from for many years. My professor Dr. John Venne noticed this flaw in my writing immediately. He approached me after I turned in my first draft of "PTSD?" a paper discussing the mental disorder of the protagonist Minnie in the Susan Glaspell play, Trifles. In this work I tried to present the reader a vision of her psyche, which directed her motive for murder.

When I first drafted the paper, I went about it with my normal routine of composing on a whim. In other words, I had my sources and the text in front of me, and I composed until I reached the page limit. This of course was evident, since Dr. Venne heavily marked my paper because of structure and punctuation errors. I had multiple sentence structure errors, subject-verb agreements, transition, and conclusion problems. When I was confronted with these problems, I completely rejected them as his error and refused to believe that I was capable of making such mistakes. However, as we went through each mistake, I discovered that I need much improvement in my writing. This was the beginning of my turn around.

Dr. Venne gave me an extension on the paper and told me to focus more on at least two more revisions. The thought of working on a paper longer then what was assigned really irked me, but since my grade was on the line and I was unhappy with my current grade, I decided to work longer on the paper. As I began to reread the paper, I found that many of my sentences were unreadable. I was shocked that I even wrote something that didn’t have structure to it. Other then the shocking structure problems, I re-discovered another one of my age-old problems in transition, which was still a nagging deficiency in my writing.

I met with Dr. Venne a few days later with my second draft, which I thought was a great draft, but to him I found that it was merely a step to the final piece. He told me that he still saw room for improvement, and that he wanted me to work on it one more time, which he stated earlier, but I tried to get out of by only revising the paper once more. This of course didn’t work because he saw a weak stance in my conclusion. "Give it a sense of closure," he told me. I thought I did, but eventually I realized I didn’t and my paper truly suffered from my neglect.

As I sat in front of my computer for the third time in four days, I was full of anger, which prevented me from getting anything productive done. I couldn’t see what Dr. Venne was talking about. I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I had closure. My mind was not in the right place, so I decided to walk away from the piece for the day and instead met with a friend of mine that was in his third year of his English major at Ball State University.

When I walked up to him, he noticed the pained look on my face. "What’s going on?" he asked. My only response, which showed my age was, "just a stupid professor." Our conversation didn’t begin with the paper but eventually ended up on the topic. My friend just sat back, listened, and nodded to let me get all of my frustrations out. When I was done and practically out of breath, he smiled and asked, "how do you feel?" I responded with a simple, "good." He then calmly dug through an old stack of papers and handed me a few copies of his compositions that he drafted for his previous English courses. He told me to look over them as guidelines, so I could find my closure, which was merely a few thoughts away he believed.

I went home and read his papers and for the first time saw that I was not writing the way an English major was suppose to write. I was a victim of the journalistic pyramid, which brought out too much objectivity and not enough subjectivity. I realized that I need to bring about my voice and opinion on a matter or issue. I was always able to identify with the internal aspects of a particular topic and textual support, but I never truly stated a belief or stance on the chosen topic. I would tend to simply report and not retort, which was the cause of my perpetual closure difficulty.

The next time I saw Dr. Venne, it was the last to discuss the paper ever since that moment of writing awakening, I have taken the writing process as the truth and have practiced the drafting, revising, pacing, creation method of writing. I no longer write on a whim, but instead I make the extra effort to purposely place word for rational intention and with emphasis in mind for the audience and my piece of mind.