Ronny Chan
Janet Allwork
ENGL 1130
January 2016
A Writing Experience Writing has never been my forte. At best, I survived the earlier years of my school life with average remarks from English teachers who assessed me. However, due to a lack of confidence in my own writing, English classes became incredibly difficult in my final years of high-school. Attempting to obtain better grades, I recall trying to absorb the almost formulaic method of writing my grade 11 and 12 teachers taught, and applied it. Nevertheless, I understood that this method was clearly not improving anything when I received my mark for the English 12 provincial. Being ill prepared for post-secondary writing is not a situation unique to myself. Rather, it is a common phenomenon for student writers of my generation. As mentioned, many student writers of my generation suffer from the same lack of proper writing education as I did when stepping into the world of post-secondary. In fact, recent studies suggest that the writing process being primed into student writers like myself during high-school is too linear, and fails to prepare them for the level of writing post-secondary schools demand for. This is because student writers are being educated to “separate the writing process into discrete stages” (Sommers 135). Moreover, due to the linear nature of current models of the writing process taught in schools, students tend to write in ways that resemble speech and as a result, neglect an important stage in writing: revision. This is far more severe than it sounds. By neglecting the revision stage in writing, student writers fail to display a firm grasp of the material. They are also unable to properly convey an idea, and are often unsure if their writing has addressed the intended audience. As stated above, student writers often neglect revision due to a speech-like style of