Language Inv. 3

In primary school, I was asked to read chapter books, books from the library, and my textbooks. I was asked to write summaries, answer questions, and write a multitude of five paragraph essays. In secondary, I was asked to read longer book and I was required to read more non-fiction. Also, I had to write papers that had strong thesis statements and that were well organized, informed, and cited.
The implicit rules I experienced during my schooling included the following: don’t give one word answers to any question, never start a sentence with “and”, always try to avoid starting a sentence with “first” or “secondly”, do not write in run on sentences, don’t use too many commas, use credible sources, don’t cite sources wrong, use pronouns instead of proper nouns repeatedly, try to grab your reader, don’t write with a personal voice (write “professionally”), etc…
These conventions have helped and they have guided my college writing. I don’t think any of the above conventions are bad, necessarily. They definitely can be argued as being legitimate or not, but I don’t think they negatively affected my growth into a writer. Overall conventions helped me because they gave me guidelines. You need to know how to do something “right” before you can start breaking the rules. For example, you need to learn how to write sentences before you can insert the occasional fragment into a paragraph.
When I was in sixth grade, we wrote a five paragraph essay every week. Yes, they became tiresome, but they pounded into my head the need for an essay to have a clear organization. In the latter part of my high school career, the focus was put on thesis statements. No matter what, you needed to have a strong thesis statement. Even if the rest of the essay was clumsy and hard to understand, as long as you had a strong thesis, the teacher would smile kindly upon your paper. I think this emphasis was good; however, it took me a long time to be able to write a good thesis statement. To me a convention can only be negative if it either prevents a student from being creative, or if it somehow impedes a student from being able to even start an essay or paper.
Conventions can be scary and hard to master; particularly if you don’t understand them. I remember the first paper I wrote for AP American History was a brilliant anecdotal piece on the Revolutionary War in which I concluded with a brilliantly insightful flourish of a figurative ending. I wrote a speculative piece that was more interested in exploring than making a point- that was a problem to say the least. I had to learn to write thesis statements, and to be honest, I still struggle with forming a thesis that is concise and that will stretch throughout my whole paper.
Even though I found thesis writing hard to master, the standard was still there. It was still a firm wall which I could measure myself against. I think that is the point of conventions- they give students a measuring rod. A specific trait they can focus on in order to improve their writing. They are there to help students pin point areas where they are struggling or need improvement.
Only up until this current semester have I begun to conquer my fear of thesis statements and paper in general. I have actually begun to enjoy writing them because they allow you to synthesize your own ideas about a particular literary work or topic.