Blog Post #8

It is hard to try and consider my style and voice. I don’t normally think about how I sound to another person when write or how stylish my style is. Usually when I write an essay or a piece of literature, I try to write as if I was talking to the reader face to face and telling him or her about the experience. I generally like writing this way because I think too often authors use complex words and sentences to seem like they are really educated or something like that, when simple sentences with great content can achieve the same result. As a reader, I would rather read and simple yet great story with great content then read a story that I can barely understand and have to look up a word every two seconds because the vocabulary is so outlandish. Kurt Vonnegut brings up a good point in his article on how to write effectively. He tells the reader to pick a subject they are passionate about. I truly believe that a writer cannot produce his or her best work if their heart is in their writing. Too often in high school, my English teachers would assign essay after essay on boring material that my classmates and I did not really care about or particularly want to write about and as a result, some of the grades suffered. Now, once in a month or two or maybe a year, we would actually get assigned a creative writing assignment in which we had freedom to write about something that interested us. My teacher even admitted that the level or writing increased because the students were passionate for what they were writing about and cared about their work. The grades on the paper significantly climbed for this paper. So what does that tell us? Why should we be assigned boring essays all the time in high school? Why discourage kids from writing when they should be encouraged? The world may never get the answer to that question. As for me, well I think if you read above you should have gotten my opinion.