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Blake Johnson
Professor Melton
ENGL 5
February 18, 2016
Essay #1: Writers Narrative
During my senior year of high school, in my English class, I received a prompt for an
essay. This essay was to be an argumentative essay regarding my ideas and opinions on the
phenomenon of nesting (staying/being supported at home by parents into adulthood) and its
increasing prevalence today, as explained by an article we had read in class. As I look at this
essay again, I am able to see how much I limited myself and my essay to mere conformity to the
high school writing formula.
I received the prompt with no particular sense of shock or horror. Rather, I set it aside,
and resolved to wait until the essay was nearly due to start on it (often a day or two prior, unless I
had extra free time). Occasionally, without committing anything to paper, Id consider my
thoughts on the matter when it would come up in class. But it was only during my actual writing
that I gave the subject any serious thought.
Now, I tend to find it easiest to write about something when I can tie it to a belief or value
of mine, especially one that is in common practice with me. This notion has struck true, or at
least come to my attention, most after reading Murrays Write Before Writing. Murray
discusses various signals that a writer can use to tell them that theyre ready to write. One such

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signal is point of view. This is when a writer, like I found myself doing, begins to feel one
way or another about something they are writing about (Murray 378).
After finally sitting down to type my essay, just a day or two (to the best of my
recollection) before the due date, I began to search for just this. The article spoke of the nature
of the nesting adult children to use parents, who were often all too willing to hold onto their
children for just a moment longer (at least, in most cases), as a sort of safety net whilst
unemployed or in dire financial straits. This idea conflicted with my personal values that my
parents had instilled in me of work ethic, personal accountability/responsibility, and respect
(versus the use of parents as a safety net), and shaped my argument into one denouncing the
nesting practice.
An interesting note to mention before I continue is that, for this essay, we were required
to submit our first draft into an online reviewing service called Brainfuse. The idea behind this
service is that a random, unbiased reviewer (typically a high school or college English
professor/teacher) looks at a randomly assigned submission, and submits feedback for the
original writer to view anonymously.
I received my reviewed first draft from my anonymous reviewer shortly after it was sent.
Most of the remarks given were in regards to repeated words, lack of specific references to what
I was saying, and general stylistic flaws. These, I gladly corrected for my final draft that I was to
turn in for class.
Whether it was due to a lack of criticism on my overall direction of the essay, or due to
my systematic use of the 5-paragraph format all through high school, my revision process was
limited to just grammatical and stylistic issues that my reviewer found. Having read Sommers

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Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers, I see that I am not alone
in this sort of shallow revision process; many others, even at the college level, never consider
rethinking major underlying themes and content of essays (Sommers 381). Instead, like me, they
tend to limit such revision processes to vocabulary and style.
Having corrected my word use and some stylistic elements of my essay, I accepted the
cleaned-up draft as good-enough material for a final draft, and turned in the essay shortly after
said cleaning.
Looking back on my writing process, it is not completely unrecognizable from what I do
when writing now. The main difference, and what bothers me the most when looking back at
this essay, was how disconnected the different paragraphs and claims in my essay were. As
Foley remarked in Unteaching the Five Paragraph Essay, juxtaposition is not
coherencenext to is not connected to (Foley 232). Many of the claims and points I made
were related to my main topic of nesting among adult children, but only tangentially related to
each other. Now, I have adopted what I feel to be more of a spontaneous style; I make points and
claims as I go, making connections as I see them. I believe this to have the effect of making the
logical flow of ideas more clear to the reader, and it lends much to the credibility of the writer
(the reader can see how an idea developed by following the writers thought process).
Reflecting on my previous writing process, I refer back to another problem with it that I
previously mentioned, which I strive to correct to this (though, admittedly, Im still getting used
to it); I would scarcely rethink main ideas or underlying content of my works. This notion was
never thoroughly stressed in high school, and likewise didnt enter my arsenal of revision
strategies until quite recently with this English class. This, however, doesnt present as terrible

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of an obstacle as it sounds when a previous work to be revised is simply looked upon from a
fresh point of view. For example, Im sure that the years time that has passed since my writing
the essay would enable me to see some new viewpoints or ideas that could greatly enhance the
essay.

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Works Cited