My best writing experience was most likely writing my essays for college. I was writing the first drafts for them in my AP English class my senior year of high school as an assignment. My drafts were proofread and edited by my peers and my teacher. It was a great experience because I was able to edit my essays using some feedback from multiple sources. I also enjoyed writing the essays because the topics were very open and I could write passionately about the subjects even though I didn’t have complete control over what the subjects were.
My worst writing experience would definitely be last year when I had to write a speech for a group project in my U.S. Government class. The assignment was to write a speech for each political or social issue we were given, resulting in a total of two essays. They had to be about three minutes long, so about two pages, single-spaced. I had already written the first speech and completed it after days of working on it. A girl in my group was supposed to be writing the second one, but waited until the night before it was due to work on it. She told me that she had finished only a few hours after having started working on it. I was so surprised that she had finished it so quickly and I asked her to email it to me so I could review it. When I was reading the speech I could tell that she didn’t write it. I searched some of the sentences online and an Obama speech appeared. She plagiarized! Of course I wasn’t going to let my name be attached to her mistake, so I ended up rewriting the entire speech. It took me most of the night and I struggled, but managed to finish and deliver both speeches for the project.
The government speech dilemma affected me the most out of the two experiences. I have learned that I end up doing most of the work in my group projects. The experience has also allowed me to see that people cannot always be trusted. Beyond plagiarism and group projects I have realized that I have high expectations in life and that I am the only one who can determine my success.
I also enjoyed writing college essay drafts in HS. We wrote them in our junior year English class and the teacher and peer feedback was very helpful. The essays are very important, so the help with editing and such was an awesome thing to have. They are also easier to write because you have a couple topics to pick from, and you can usually find one that is meaningful to talk about.
ReplyDeleteThe group project speech writing sounds awful! I am sorry you had to deal with that I would have been very upset with her. You can't plagiarize the President!