A little over three months ago, I, along with thousands of other freshmen, embarked on a scary, yet exciting new chapter in our lives. Most of us, myself included, thought that we were well prepared for our first classes as college students. If I were asked what I had learned during college, I would have a hard time stating anything other than useless facts related to my classes. My commonplace book includes posts from throughout the semester that express my progression as both a student and a person.
While I was rereading entries from my commonplace book, I was reminded of the dejected feeling that I had at the beginning of each unit. It was almost amusing to me to see how fearful I was of each project and then see how I gradually progressed through the writing process until I had slain the “beast”. The majority of my posts in the commonplace book talk about how everything was new to me, which was probably the cause of my anxiety in this class. Never did a moment go by where I felt comfortable or confident with what I was doing. Many posts portrayed this discomfort, such as the in class essay reflection where my first sentence states that I almost had a panic attack when I saw the unit instructions and the post on new ideas where I discussed how everything felt new to me. As the semester progressed so did my writing. I can see a great improvement from my first unit reflection to the second and so on. Just two weeks after the first reflection, I was thinking like a writer. I talked about how dreadful the drafting process was and how I was struggling with using rhetoric correctly in my paper which was astonishing to me because two weeks before then I had absolutely no idea what rhetoric was.
The more that I read my entries, I began to notice that many of my posts weren’t very deep in meaning. I knew from the beginning of the semester that I was supposed to write in a sophisticated manner, but I think that I flew through the short daily writes so I could get out of class early. With a simple glance over, I noticed that there was virtually no substance, which wouldn’t be good when it came time for grading. I think that the biggest think missing from my commonplace book would be the time put into it. It didn’t matter whether it was a short daily write or a lengthy reflection, I wrote the first things that came to my mind and rarely ever read over what I had written. Now that I have had to reread and correct the majority of my posts, I can definitely say that I have learned from my mistakes. I actually think that my comments are better than the original posts.
Nearly all of my entries had to do with learning. It’s not hard to imagine that as the semester progressed that I would continuously be learning as well, I mean that is the point of college. Through a simple exercise of watching differently composed Op-Docs, I realized that being different isn’t just okay, it is encouraged and praised. Without even knowing it, this semester has been one big “how to” guide on how to find your unique inner-writer. My reflections on The New York Times guide, the Op-Doc analysis, and the PowToon video express vivid amounts of frustration due to the fact that they were pushing me toward a creative edge that I had never dared exploring before. My high school never tried to get us toward the edge, but merely to memorize the basic five paragraph structure inside and out like we were cadets in the military. My commonplace book reminded me that finding this “creative edge” was a little like climbing Mount Everest. As each unit ended and a new began, I could feel myself becoming more and more comfortable with what I was doing. In my PowToon reflection, I talked about how I felt like a fish out of water at the beginning of the unit, but later described myself as one who was called to be an animator at Disney. The entry “mistakes” is one of my favorites because I can think of hundreds of mistakes I have made since August and the entry is only about four sentences long. Though it may be brief, it holds a pretty powerful message when it states that mistakes are okay because how else would we learn about ourselves. This logic can be applied to everything that we do, not just during college but in our lives as well.
The tags that I have decided to include are what I believe best represent my commonplace book. The first tag is “learning”. It may seem obvious but I learned so much about not the only the writing process, but in my self too. Nearly all of my entries in the commonplace book discuss some lesson that I learned from the time when I figured out MLA format to when I finally realized how to revise the style of my papers. The second tag is “Fear of Failure”. One of my favorite quotes is from Gena Showalter that says “Giving up is the only sure way to fail”. One of my biggest problems throughout the semester was being discouraged right from the beginning, which I talked about in each unit reflection. Once I overcame the fear of screwing up the project, I was finally able to get to work and spit out some pretty good material. My third tag is “Resiliency”. I thought about combining resiliency and fear of failure but the more that I thought about it, I realized that they were completely different. Resiliency deals with the extreme amount of effort that I put into each any ever piece that I brought to class even though I would rather be doing literally anything else. It also covers all of the times when I had no clue what I was doing and had to start over from scratch, even though I could have easily turned in a piece that would have received an okay grade. “Differences” is my fourth tag. The idea of differences first came to me when we were working on the Op-Doc analysis and each had videos that were all polar opposites of each other. Not only were the styles of our Op-Docs different, but so were the styles in which we wrote our analyses. In high school we learn how to do everything just like one another, but in college we finally open our eyes and see that being different is what makes us who we are. My final tag is “Creative Edge”. It took me to the late half of the semester to finally find my creative edge. Because it took me so long to find it, I had started to think that it was some mythical creature like Bigfoot. The creative edge is what makes a writer a writer. Hours of sitting at my desk, starring at my laptop, and jamming out to Spotify allowed me to dive into the deep dark parts of my mind of which I didn’t even know existed. While I was doing this, I would spit out material far superior to anything else that I had scribbled down. Before this semester I never thought about how simple things like the wording of a sentence or placement of a source can change the entire rhetorical outlook of your product. The creative edge, in my opinion, is the most important thing that you can find as a writer. When you combine all five of these tags together, you can begin to imagine the metamorphosis that I have undergone in just one short semester.