Mr. Lessing told the class to write about an experience that we could give much detail, original, and personal. It seems that as soon as a teacher tells me to be original the complete opposite pops up into my head. The only thing I could think about was ordinary teenage experiences that were outrageously cliché. Not only was being a creative writer my problem, but I was extremely lazy, the standard five paragraph essay with the five sentence structure was my best friend , and I wasn’t ready to give that up yet. I was that student who always procrastinated about how I would actually spend a reasonable amount of time writing this paper but instead I would end up in the computer lab the day it was due trying to pull something together. Mr. Lessing had told the class to make sure our papers were sincere and true, but since I had just wrote it last period, of course it wasn’t. Once the day came to turn the paper in, I always turned mine in feeling though I know I could’ve done better. When Mr. Lessing gave me my paper back, there were a lot of helpful tips and comments to help me improve my paper. Then that was when my laziness jumped started back up, because now I knew the corrections that were needed to give me a good paper but I just didn’t want to spend the time out and actually correct it.

As I said earlier, being original was something I felt I had to work on personally not that I ever was ever told by Mr. Lessing and Mr. Soffer. I feel as though none of my experiences were exciting enough to write about, or they were just experiences that any other average teenager had been through. Though people say writing an original paper is easy, I disagree because not only does it have to be something that really has happened to you, but it has to be good enough to keep your audience interested. That’s why I found the personal essay that we wrote so difficult, because I didn’t want to give out to much information to the point where I felt uncomfortable, because then again I just meet most of these people in my class.

I also have a big problem with punctuation, and I have the tendency to have several run on sentences in my papers. When I’m writing my paper I just write without worrying about corrections or errors. I usually tend to just put my thoughts on paper and make corrections at the end, but then I soon end up forgetting.

“The mistakes that you make on your paper involving punctuations aren’t major, but they are mistakes that need to be corrected”, said by one of my fellow classmates.

In all the papers that I write I try to keep my audience as interested as possible, I put myself in the audience position. I realized that a good paper isn’t something that can be rushed or forced out. A good paper is something that takes time, dedication, and mainly PATIENCE. A new system that I’m trying to get myself into the habit of using is revision. I realized that revision is a key component of writing essays I usually skip over. I have come to understand that if I push my laziness aside and actually put my mind to work and revise my writing, writing A-plus papers will come with ease. Mr. Lessing has been a great help and mentor in my writing career, and with all the strategies that he has given me to help my essays to evolve had been something I greatly appreciate.