Adams 1

Margery Adams

Dr. Jan Reiman

English 1101x

21 March 2010

Reinstating the Rules of Writing

When you are in middle school, you are taught that to develop a well written paper, you

need an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. They called it the five paragraph

essay. Paper after paper, teachers asked you to use this set up, criticizing your work if you

strayed from the guidelines. From sixth grade to my junior year, I used this form of writing.

After taking some English classes in college though, I have come to realize that this little bit of

information is far from the truth. In chapter one of Writing Conventions by Min-Zhan Lu and

Bruce Horner, they explain why it is not necessary to complete a written paper in a certain

format, or in the correct order. Instead, they say writing is a process and that there is no single

correct process that can be applied to constructing a paper. This reading asked me to challenge

everything I was taught in middle school on writing. They say you will use different ways you

think are helpful, as you write different papers. Lu and Horner also discuss how crucial rough

drafts are. It is important to save every paper, and not go in and make corrections on the original

draft. Making corrections on the original draft can erase information that may have been helpful.

It is important to be able to see the progress in your work, so you can see how far your paper has

come, how your original ideas blossomed, and it may give you ideas you missed early on, that

you can now include in your final draft.

 Adams 2

I agree with the majority of what Lu and Horner say. There are no set steps you should

take when writing. Lu and Horner use the thesis statement as an example; you do not have to

come up with a thesis statement first, during, or last. Many people create a thesis statement, then

try and fit their paper within those parameters. But wouldn’t it be so much easier to write your

draft, and then come up with a thesis statement that fits your whole paper. When I sit down to

write, I just type out what first comes into my head, and to be honest, it usually is not that good.

But after I play around, finish the paragraph, go add an introduction, and jazz it up a little, it

doesn’t come out too shabby. If you follow a strict set of rules as you write a paper, I do not see

how you would ever be able to get your thoughts down. Lu and Horner stress the importance of

finding a strategy that works well for you each time you write. They state that when you are

faced with the question of what to do, you should "use others advice and your own experiences

to pose possible models for your composing process and re-pose-compose an actual course of

writing." They talk about many different writing processes in chapter one, and one topic, the

importance of peer editing, we have done many times in class. It is good to have a fresh eye look

over a paper you have written. This new perspective will give you insight to what you have

forgotten, where your grammar has faulted, and places in your paper that make utterly no sense.

Peer editing help us "compose" and "re-compose" by using thoughts from our peers. This chapter

has taught me how to develop new strategies and reiterated the importance of revising our peer’s

papers. I know now that papers do not need to be written in a specific order, no matter how you

were taught in sixth grade.

When you turn in your final paper, please write a self-assessment, where you note what you have revised,
what you still feel needs work and where you’d like me to pay special attention to your work. The more
insight and information you can give me about your paper, the more I will be able to help guide you in
revising it.

I found this paper very difficult to write. The chapter itself was hard for me to read, so I struggled
with putting what I thought about it onto paper. My final draft is very different than my original draft. I
have gone into more detail on different subjects. I have also included more quotes and things from
chapter one. I still feel like my paper could be stronger. I just really find it hard to write a paper you are
not interested in. I feel like there are some places where I might stray off topic, or not really make sense,
so I would ask you to pay attention to that for me.