Honors Writing 150

Can you believe that Honors Writing 150 was my favorite class?  Neither can I.

I feel bad for Writing; it gets such a bad wrap.  Everyone hates writing because they assume they're bad at it, and those that think they're good at writing are those artistic hipsters.  Gosh they always annoyed me.  Correction: they still annoy me.

So why do so many people hate writing?  That's easy.  It takes time, we're usually forced to write for dumb class assignments, and we're embarrassed of our work.  At least that's how it was for me all through grade school.  Somehow my writing always sounded so stupid.  Peer editing was the worst, not only was the teacher reading my horrible paper, but so were my friends. 

My change in attitude towards writing took a frickin long time.  Like I said before, I assumed I wasn't a good writer because I wasn't one of those creative artsy kids.  I started to think differently by senior year in my AP Lit and Comp class.  My teacher gave us a lot of freedom in what we could write about and I kind of enjoyed it.  Don't laugh.  Then I took the AP test.  I was HOPING for a 4, but was surprised to find that I received a 5.  My confidence in my writing abilities sky rocketed. 

Then I went to BYU.  Fives weren't a big deal.

For some reason I signed up for the Honors Program.  I knew that I wouldn't graduate with honors because my GPA is no where near their requirements and I'm too lazy to do all the extra work, but I signed up nonetheless.  Every honors student has to take the Honors 150 Writing class.  I was mad.  That was the one class I had tested out of, yet I still had to take it.  All for a program that I wasn't really part of.

So I took the class and it was really hard.  I spent hours in the library reading peer reviewed articles about homeschooling for my research paper.  I spent hours agonizing over poorly written thesis statements.  I spent hours staring at blank Word documents.  I spent hours revising draft after draft.

Ok the word "hours" looks weird now. 

Basically I hated and loved that class.  I learned a lot about writing, but I'm not going to try and explain what changed in me.  Just give writing a chance.  It's really not that bad.

Writing and I have a healthy relationship now.  Of course, I don't love writing when I'm assigned a 10 page essay about obesity, but sometimes it's ok.  For example, this blog.  I enjoy blogging.  I can use as much sarcasm and opinion as I want, and people actually READ it.  Remember how I said I used to be embarrassed when people read my stuff?  Yeah, now I'm posting it on the internet for perfect strangers to read.

I hope I get stalkers.