A Must Read
I finished Stephen King‘s book on Writing a few days ago. I thought it was going to be on our final exam and isn’t, but it is still filled with a lot of great information, well worth finishing. I expect the majority of those reading this post now and in the future won’t be writing for a living and may think that this book won’t help them much with the rest of their college education. In fact, Stephen himself states that a writer doesn’t need to study any book on writing to learn to write better. He says we (I’m a beginning writer) need to do as much reading and writing as we can, and that will improve our writing in the long run.
If you haven’t seen the exam questions yet, you will find out that our Professor for this course believes that writing plays a large part of any job in any field we plan on working. (I’m not discounting this idea, just letting you know it didn’t originate with me).With this in mind it would behoove each and every one of us to do whatever we can to improve our writing. This might entail finishing the textbook for this class, or keeping a dictionary on your desk not only for definitions but also for finding the correct spelling, or continuing your blog as has been suggested.
If you want to be a writer like I do, it would be pretty obvious that you’d want your writing to improve. On the other hand, even though I hadn’t thought about it before this week,you don’t want to find a great job and find out too late that they expect you to do more writing than you anticipated. Most of us want to be taken seriously, if we can’t spell or utilize English correctly, then will our superior listen to us?
For those of you that would like to read a lot more so that your writing will improve, I’m a part of a writing web site that has loads of things to read. From novels in the making to long stories and short stories, poetry and about anything you would be interested in. You can even post things you’ve written, you can get assignments critiqued if needed to improve your own writing. You can have a free life-time membership, or if you later decide you want something more from the site, you can upgrade your account in a variety of ways. If you want to check it out, look here: http://www.writing.com\authors\sha4852. (It looks like this doesn’t utilize a direct link, I’ll have to find out how to do that-so you’ll need to copy and paste it). That will take you to my page where you can sign up if you’d like. I’ve been a part of this site for four years and it has helped me immensely in my writing.
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For any that would like an e-book on Grammar, this link has one free, which can be downloaded to your computer, or possibly Kindle app if you have one. I don’t know about the latter, as I don’t have one. 🙂 She also has daily writing tips which could be set up on your Google reader for ease of use. For this location you only have to click on the highlighted area in this paragraph and it takes you directly to the web site.
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Marsha's Blog About Writing 
Dec 10, 2011 @ 16:59:28
Marsha,
I have never had any interest in being a writer. It is something that does not come easily for me. I want to sound reasonably intelligent when I do write something though, so I try to use proper grammar and spelling. Someones writing will be the first impression made to many employers. A resume filled with spelling and grammar errors is likely to be put to the bottom of the stack. English is one of the most important classes we can take. It will benefit us more than any other, and is important no matter what field we are going into. Good luck with your writing.
Tracy Metcalf
Dec 10, 2011 @ 23:40:27
Tracy,
As far as resume’s go, you are right on that one except many places now take electronic resume’s where they can be done at the location on their computer or online from the privacy of the potential employee’s home.
If I could go back to the past when I was in High School to let myself know that one day I’d be a writer, I would have told that person (myself) that they were nuts, as I didn’t write back then. The schools didn’t really teach writing beginning with the early grades like they do now.
My daughter is teaching a pre-school two days a week for a few hours and they are already learning to recognize letters, numbers and shapes. When I was in kindergarten I don’t think we even were exposed to them at that time. Kindergarten seemed (from my memory) to be more of a time to be more social, have nap time, play outside together and have stories read to us.
As far as your comment about writing not being easy for you, I think a large part of it is making up one’s mind that it will get easier each time a paper is prepared. If you decide to continue this blog, I bet your approach to writing will become more stress free.
Dec 11, 2011 @ 18:51:01
I do believe that you cannot survive (survive well anyway) without the ability to manipulate language skillfully. But more than that, and this will extend the idea more than most students are willing to accept at this point, there’s a ton of evidence that writing itself creates better thinkers, and that’s something society really needs. And even if society didn’t need that, it serves you well to think critically and problem solve skillfully so that your own life goes as you want. We all don’t think of ourselves as writers. But to some extent, we all are.