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Erick Pineda

Becky Hsu

COLWRIT R1A Sec. 14

06 December 2019

My Journey as a Writer

As a young kid at the age of 10, I was first introduced to the American language. Not

being able to fully understand English was a struggle. However, I challenged myself to become

fluent. Being a first-generation student of color with hopes of excelling at the number one public

institution in the world is intimidating. The first day I stepped foot on campus shocked me, never

having felt this intimidated before. Fast forward to my COLWRIT R1A course, I was required to

write at a level that I was not capable of at the time. Some struggles that I initially came across in

writing were the lack of confidence, lack of ideas, and lack of elaboration. But overall, my

biggest challenge this semester was being afraid of being wrong and being ashamed to accept

feedback from my peers or my professor. This led to the inconsistency of precise ideas

throughout my essays. Also, this led to producing broad thesis statements. For instance, in my

synthesis essay ​Climate Change​, “Local solutions would be more be more effective because

global solutions require more government cooperation which the world doesn’t have right now.”

This statement was not precise. Instead, it was awfully broad. Nonetheless, with feedback, I was

able to develop a better statement. I revised it to, “​At this point in time, taking action at a local

level would be more effective than having a global solution since this would require heavy

government involvement. This kind of power is not easily accessible at the moment due to a lack
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of leadership from government officials.”​ Notably, a way that helped me become open-minded

about my writing and progress is through attending office hours. As a result of this, I discovered

a different scenario of resources. Another key point, I quickly learned Anne Lamott’s strategies

from the passage, “Shitty First Drafts”. She elaborates about famous writers constantly facing

similar struggles when writing first drafts, which is slowly transformed into great work. While

reading this passage, I associated right away and was inspired to be confident of writing a shitty

first draft. Once I began using the technique of “Shitty First Drafts”, my confidence began to

increase, as I accepted the idea of not being a perfectionist. I linked a past experience with the

strategy of a shitty first draft. In ceramics, I created projects such as bowls, mugs, animals, etc.

At this moment, the foundation I used on a project for ceramics is very similar compared to the

procedure of structuring an essay. Initially, there are steps before you even begin a project in

ceramics. In the manner that, first you have to hand-make your project with clay. However, it’s

necessary to create a blueprint beforehand which is identical to an outline for an essay. I now

invest a greater amount of time on structuring my essays, because my work is a depiction of my

foundation. Furthermore, as a result of accepting feedback, my ideas became coherent and

helped me move away from doubting my work. The growth of my essays is demonstrated

through the coherence of my ideas. My papers flow more smoothly and allow the reader to

understand my piece.

Furthermore, my first essay, “Brighter Future” is a critical response essay, in which I

summarized Jonathan Foley’s argument. In addition, I expanded on whether Foley’s argument

works or doesn’t. He presents great ideas but fails to propose a plan on how to approach and

execute his ideas. For instance, he proposes educating girls, protecting the rainforest, having
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family solutions such as recycling, using renewable energy and advocating for a better future.

Unfortunately, government leaders are failing to lead our nation. This paper was not the most

challenging, but there is always room for improvement and I developed a stronger thesis

statement through revision and editing. Indeed, the synthesis essay, “Ways to Resolve Climate

Change”, follows after the critical response paper for the reason that in the critical response I was

only analyzing and evaluating Jonathan Foley’s ideas. However, in the synthesis paper, my

purpose is to make connections through the comparison of multiple works such as articles in

order to support a claim. In this paper, my claim is that global solutions should not be considered

at the moment because they require heavy government involvement. I agree with the claim of

local solutions being the best approach concerning climate change. Like, some of the few things

that people can begin reducing are food waste, excessive use of electricity, and production of

greenhouse gases. People can protect the local rainforest through advocacy from community

leaders. This paper helped me become a passionate writer as it forced me to present my ideas

evidently in a well-organized structure. I really enjoyed writing this paper because it helped me

become more aware of my techniques. But most importantly, the passion I developed for climate

change motivated me to elaborate as deeply as possible to make my claim coherent. Furthermore,

the next essay I will be using is the literary analysis. This paper was a bit more difficult for me

because I had difficulty closely examining Cormac McCarthy’s novel, ​The Road​. I had to deeply

examine the meaning of a father’s goal concerning his son throughout a harsh journey. I

struggled more on this paper because my ideas were not coherent which led to having a scramble

of ideas in my essay. I was rushing through my ideas and not elaborating deeply enough to

provide concrete details. My ideas were not aligning with my structure, but I was able to correct
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my mistakes early which kept me away from attempting to prove the entirety of my argument in

one body paragraph. Despite the mistakes I made this semester, whether it was part of my R1A

class or my social life, I’m very happy to say that I overcame the obstacles of being afraid to fail

because we first must fail, before we can succeed.