I've started this (hopefully) daily writing habit, and like I mentioned before the big realisation that got me here is that I actually do enjoy writing. And it was some thinking and reminiscing the other night that really helped pushed me over the edge to take action.
I was thinking back to a grade 12 English essay I wrote. I think it was titled, or at least it had this statement right in the introduction: English is crap. And man...I still stand by it. Because it was a critique of what the OP English subject had become in Queensland, Australia, in 2008 - 2 years of writing analytical essays on modern (only within the last 100 or so years) topics over and over again and nothing actually useful.
Not once learning how to write a cover letter or resume, that was left for the "English Communication" students - kids who weren't going to go to university so clearly they needed all the help they could get to have success (I didn't go to uni anyway, it was clear to me by year 12 that uni wasn't something I was going to enjoy even though all my classes were set up for it). Not writing anything creative, that would give too much variety and require subjective analysis and critique of actual written English ability, a bit much for the progressive hippies that were filling English departments at that time (it's probably worse by now). Just theoretical, airy-fairy fluff, supposedly analysing why someone wrote what they did, or acted in the way they did, without the need to be grounded in reality. As long as you made the right number of arguments and had the right structure (oh, and also kept within the stupidly small 600-800 word limit...unless you were a favourite student, then you could go over and not be penalised because it was "justified"), you would get good grades. And generally I did, not outstanding A+'s, but typically in the B to A range. But after doing a rinse and repeat of the same thing a few times I realised this was not actually teaching me anything or becoming useful for real life.
Now you could argue, and to be honest I probably would have back then even with this opinion I had, that writing something more creative or reading more classic sources from authors further back or of different views than H. G. Wells would also not be useful either. But in hindsight, at least it would have caused a growth in how to communicate different ideas in different ways. If there is something I think we can all agree on, communication is a key skill for success in life, and it's a skill many people severely lack.
I wish I had that essay to read and review, I'd probably facepalm myself multiple times over how I argued my points and how I'd written it, but that's part of growth in communication too isn't it? And for what it's worth, that title didn't get me a failing grade, I think it may have even scraped out a B.
I was thinking back to a grade 12 English essay I wrote. I think it was titled, or at least it had this statement right in the introduction: English is crap. And man...I still stand by it. Because it was a critique of what the OP English subject had become in Queensland, Australia, in 2008 - 2 years of writing analytical essays on modern (only within the last 100 or so years) topics over and over again and nothing actually useful.
Not once learning how to write a cover letter or resume, that was left for the "English Communication" students - kids who weren't going to go to university so clearly they needed all the help they could get to have success (I didn't go to uni anyway, it was clear to me by year 12 that uni wasn't something I was going to enjoy even though all my classes were set up for it). Not writing anything creative, that would give too much variety and require subjective analysis and critique of actual written English ability, a bit much for the progressive hippies that were filling English departments at that time (it's probably worse by now). Just theoretical, airy-fairy fluff, supposedly analysing why someone wrote what they did, or acted in the way they did, without the need to be grounded in reality. As long as you made the right number of arguments and had the right structure (oh, and also kept within the stupidly small 600-800 word limit...unless you were a favourite student, then you could go over and not be penalised because it was "justified"), you would get good grades. And generally I did, not outstanding A+'s, but typically in the B to A range. But after doing a rinse and repeat of the same thing a few times I realised this was not actually teaching me anything or becoming useful for real life.
Now you could argue, and to be honest I probably would have back then even with this opinion I had, that writing something more creative or reading more classic sources from authors further back or of different views than H. G. Wells would also not be useful either. But in hindsight, at least it would have caused a growth in how to communicate different ideas in different ways. If there is something I think we can all agree on, communication is a key skill for success in life, and it's a skill many people severely lack.
I wish I had that essay to read and review, I'd probably facepalm myself multiple times over how I argued my points and how I'd written it, but that's part of growth in communication too isn't it? And for what it's worth, that title didn't get me a failing grade, I think it may have even scraped out a B.