Walking into this class, my writing was nothing but decent. I had always loved writing poetry or short stories for myself, which I was never proud of, and writing a big paper would haunt my soul for every day leading up to the due date. I would fear writing long papers so deeply that I would write it two hours before it was due, with adrenaline blazing the way. 

As a child of academics, I grew up being critiqued on parallelism in my sentence structure, unnecessary words, and essay structure. I may have known all the words, sung all the notes, but I never quite learned the song. My writing was always ‘professional’, and creativity was always lost in a vacuum. 

So, what changed my dry, brittle, writing? The Home Essay 

As a product cultured in the Westchester industrial education facility, I can not recall a time when I was prompted to write a piece on a topic that meant anything to me, and if I did care, I was never pushed to be creative and step outside the formula. The writing I knew was a regurgitation of strategies, formats, and I always wrote to please. 

My take away from this class should never be undervalued. I learned to enjoy writing. The home essay forced me to write for myself, and because it was on such a sensitive topic in my life, I was forced to make myself proud of it. I found my voice within that essay. I learned to break the structure in that essay. I learned of the closure I could find in writing from that essay. 

I came in knowing conventions, rhetorical appeals, how to use evidence in and out, but I was lost when it came to creative essay organization. 

Since the home essay, I have genuinely enjoyed assignments. I have finally broken my decade long writer’s block and have two notebooks with my poetic ramblings.I would go as far as to say that the largest gain in this class is not strategies or critiques, but it catalyzes creativity.