ENGL 298 B: Intermediate Writing Social Sciences   Autumn 2011, University of Washington

The first writing assignment we did for this class was a personal essay, and that essay took me off guard a bit to begin with. I haven’t written an essay about myself for school since junior high (not counting the college admittance essay). I’m not used to writing that way and it was a weird feeling because I didn’t really know what to write and I ended up talking just to fill up the space. My essays in high school were always really focused and research oriented so it felt like it was cheating somehow to just talk about myself. These blog posts come a lot more naturally to me because in them we talk about the assignments from class (not my past experiences with learning, blegh), so it feels more like a discussion than BS-ing.

When we got the instructions for the major papers I felt a lot better because the prompts were formatted the same as what I’ve done previously. Then I read Goldman and Plato and really enjoyed the readings, and figured writing about them would come pretty easily. Then I waited until the last minute to write the first paper and wasn’t terribly happy with the finished product. That paper was okay, but usually I write a rough draft in a couple hours, then come back to it the next day and either rewrite it if I really hate it, or edit the rough draft normally. Doing the essay at the last minute didn’t give me the time to do the two-draft thing. My fault.

The next paper assigned wasn’t actually a paper, but a proposal, so I once again didn’t do the two-draft thing I usually do. Then I came to class and realized that I’d misread the prompt for the proposal; I’d mistakenly been thinking that you only wrote the essay from the perspective of either Goldman OR Socrates. I’m not sure why I thought that, but that means that I’m going to have to structure the paper a lot differently than I’d thought. I was previously going to write the Goldman/Socrates paper as a normal paper with a thesis and everything, but now that I realize that I’m supposed to talk about both authors’ potential reactions to the stuff I’m writing the paper on, I’d much rather do a dialogue. I’ve only written a couple dialogues before, and one was an extra credit physics assignment (long story), so this will again be mostly a new writing experience for me. I have a focused topic to talk about though, and I feel good about the assignment. It seems like it’ll be fun, and I’d write my first draft of it tonight if I didn’t have metal club to go to soon.

As for my reading habits, they didn’t change at all for the early readings. I always try to read everything really thoroughly the first time, and go back occasionally to look at passages that stuck out to me. For Hobbes that’s changed. Leviathan bores the crap out of me and I’ve gotten to the point where I kind of skim through the passages, and I haven’t been picking up a whole lot more than the little captions on the sides have been pointing out.