Relax! It's just a narrative!

When I was at school, I was often asked to turn in narratives and college essays. This made me a quite flexible writer. I wrote for academic reasons, but soon I discovered writing for pleasure. My school held writing competitions, in English as well as in Spanish. I won the competition twice and that made me feel as if it was my destiny to become a writer.

Unfortunately, that never happened. Instead, I had to devote myself to studying and writing academic pieces. I had neither time nor energy to write for pleasure. Whenever I did find my muse, I would sit down and scribble a few lines, but then I was never able to finish a piece. This really frustrated me and eventually, I stopped trying.

Nowadays, whenever I have to write for a language assignment, I feel as if it was someone else writing. Usually these pieces have little of me, and a lot of what an English student should be like. I remember trying to "innovate" in my writings for Language II, but these innovations were not welcomed by my teacher.

Somewhere in between the past and the present, I realized I have been quite a good academic writer. When I was at Letras, I loved writing papers on theory on literature or human studies. I still enjoy having assignments that require working with different sources and usually, the results are good. However, this practice has led me to be what I consider a boring writer and to write plain pieces such as the present one.

As a teacher, I find it hard to assess the writing tasks I assign to my students. Usually I cannot really explain why I think the writing piece is not altogether well-written. I tend to focus on grammar and spelling mistakes although I know I am missing more important issues that would help me guide my students into successful writing.

This year I have begun to realize there is a whole world behind teaching writing skills. I'm very interested in process writing, not only because of what I have heard in this Language course but also because of what I have heard from other teachers at the Joaquín V. González.

All in all, I am looking forward to finding a different approach from the one I have been taught and worked with so far. This will not only help me improve my own skills but also those of my students.

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