Considering we are all in college, we've all had more than enough exposure and/or experience with writing. I've saved things from elementary school and I when I look through them, I can see the stages my writing went through. It's something to look back on and think wow, I've come a long way from scribbles :-) When you get to this stage in life, you think you know all there is to know about writing and it becomes kind of a mundane task to complete. However, writing is a process and one can always improve upon this art. It takes a good teacher to help you rediscover how powerful writing can be and challenge someone to become a better writer; such is the case with me. In elementary school we practiced writing on a frequent basis to prepare for the writing portion of the EOG-I still have stories I wrote. Writing can only improve with practice and I think this repetition helped start me on a path of striving for the best work I could/still can produce. I've enjoyed having a blog. I feel like I can express myself more clearly through writing instead of talking. Writing can be just as powerful as speech. I've read somewhere that anything worth writing is worth reading so the connection that these two art forms share is again exemplified by this statement. I think this class has allowed me to see that writing doesn't have to be all serious all the time-even though most of the assignments aren't conducive to a humorous piece of literature but blogging allows me to do whatever suits me.

For my book project, I'm planning to write about an experience I had with driving-don't we all have one of those stories!! The topics my story will cover include advice, humor, difficulties, help, and lessons learned. I know how I want the story to go in my head but the challenge will be making sure the finished product on paper matches my vision. I expect it to be fun but it may be a little tougher than I imagine now. Tompkins writes, "It it difficult--even for adults--to craft well-formed stories incorporating plot and character development and other elements of story structure", (Chapter 9, page 303). I plan on using the bullets on page 308 of our text to make sure I've covered every potential problem in writing my story. To further illustrate the difficulty of writing a story, I found a quote from Nathanial Hawthorne, "Easy reading is damn hard writing" (http://www.quotegarden.com/writing.html). It may be a daunting task but I'm willing to face it!!