Benjamin
Franklin once said, “If
you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something
worth reading or do things worth writing.” For me, this famous quotation best
illustrates the importance of writing. Writing is very important for many
reasons: through writing, we can express who we are as persons, writing fosters our abilities to explain complex positions to readers and
ourselves, it helps us preserve our ideas, writing also helps us demonstrate our
intellectual flexibility and maturity, and writing equips us with the
communication and thinking skills we need to participate effectively in life.
We should look back to all the
knowledge that has been written down through the ages and see what people have
learned from this knowledge. Through the written knowledge of the past, we
learned new things, explored history, and learned to live and cope in a more
convenient way.
In our class today, we talked about how we feel about reading and
writing. Miss Dianne relayed to us the result of the survey we took last
meeting about the Internet and Digital Tools usage. During our first meeting,
Miss Dianne made us write a bit about how we feel about writing and research. Basically,
out of 64 respondents, 30 of my classmates feel positive towards writing; 14
feel apprehensive and 10 are feeling neutral about this topic.
If
I remember correctly, at the time, I was feeling fairly neutral about writing.
I don’t think I’m a bad writer but I do believe my writing skills can improve
so much more. On the plus side, I’m already an avid reader so I’m pretty familiar
with different forms of writing. I like to think I know how sentences are
supposed to be constructed and how words should be used. On the negative side
though, I’m extremely lazy. I don’t really use much of my time writing. When I was
younger though, in elementary school and high school, I used to love making
short stories and novels. Unfortunately, I don’t think I ever got to finish a
novel.
Most
of my classmates have said in the survey that they mainly like to write to
express themselves. They use blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other social
networking sites to post their sentiments. They also pointed out the relaxing
and meditative effects of writing. Some people tend to write to help relieve
stress and express their emotions.
Though
we already know the many advantages of writing, there are the problems and
needs we need to address and work on. Some of these were brought up by my
classmates during today’s class. There are our problems with grammar,
vocabulary, difficulty of putting thoughts into words and being scared of
criticism.
With
all the problems brought to our attention, I think it would be best to first work
on our fear of criticism. If we start gaining confidence, we wouldn’t be as afraid
to commit mistakes; we would learn to experiment, try new things and improve
our writing skills. We should learn to be more open to criticism so we would
know which areas we need to improve on and therefore produce better writing in
the future.
