When I entered my first English classroom in college, I
soon realized years of
grammar workbooks and diagramming sentences had done little to help prepare me as a
writer. Every writing assignment caused
unnecessary and unwanted anxieties. My previous inexperience in
writing served as the impetus behind
these anxieties. I had little or no
prior knowledge of literary
analysis, MLA style, or general literary jargon. Since I had
written only one research paper, outlining, editing, revising, and research were vague and
distant memories. I believe the first and most valuable
lesson I had learned in English 101 was to narrow my analysis of a paper by dissecting the
narrative. During my first two years at
Pierce College, a junior college, I wrote
basic reader-response papers over characters or themes.