Matthew Mandolfo

Ms. Townley

Period 1

13 December 2019

Growth as a Writer

To say that I’ve grown as a writer from my time at Creighton Prep is the understatement

of the decade. Not only has my writing grown, it has entirely transformed from subpar fluff with

decent grammar and conventions to high level analysis with slightly better grammar and

conventions. I’m sure I’ve picked up on some rules about grammar and MLA while I have

produced writing in highschool, but my most significant growth has come in the form of

changing the substance of what I write to make it actually mean something.

At the end of my eighth grade year I knew a lot about the rules of writing but little to

nothing about how to create a substantive piece. Despite my teachers attempts, I could never

write something that meant anything. Luckily in middle school, all that is required is knowing

how to recount information. As long as a student could describe plot and basic themes they could

score well on most papers. I specifically remember a research paper I wrote where this was true.

That paper was easily my worst piece of writing I’ve ever created, which is a high bar to meet. I

have written more than one bad paper, but this paper was especially terrible. I simply recounted

basic facts about the 90’s without actually saying anything. A person wouldn’t have even needed

to be alive during the 90’s to know most of what my paper said before they had read it. The

worst part, however, was the fact that there was zero analysis. This was one of the only papers

we wrote that needed a bare minimum of analysis. Any extrapolation or thoughtful comment at
all would have given me the points, but throughout 6 pages of paper I had exactly zero sentences

of analysis. While this paper was the worst I have ever written, I am glad that I wrote it, because

I learned a lot from that failure.

High school writing is a different beast when compared to middle school writing and

because of this I finally learned how to write a good essay. Freshman year I was shocked when I

had to actually mean something with my essays. Basic plot and themes didn’t cut it anymore. I

had to focus on meaning and purpose. I had to think about why this character was added or why

this author wrote the story. Freshman year saw a large improvement in writing, but I still wasn’t

meaning much with my papers. For the most part, they were the same as others and the

“arguments” were so easy to defend they didn’t seem like arguments at all. Sophomore year was

similar in that there was another shift. Meaning and purpose behind things were looked at in

more detail. I had theses that made sense and were mostly my own ideas. This independence was

a large turn from past years because before I had always asked someone about what to write.

Thinking of my own ideas was a huge step in improvement.

Junior and senior year I had another large improvement that came in the form of doing

what most consider actual analysis and learning how to structure a paper. AP Composition and

AP United States History developed these skills incredibly. In those classes I learned to read

from documents, make extrapolations from them about the issue at hand, and then form an

argumentative thesis that could be disagreed with. These papers were finally something I could

be happy with.