What if I've Always Been Terrible at Writing and/or Understanding Literature?

Question

I've always made awful grades in writing essays, whether about myself or a story covered in class. I think I'll never be able to improve based on my past performance.

Answer 1

Writing takes practice just like anything else. It's important for students who are challenged with writing to be able to have a choice in what they write. Research shows that when you write about things that are meaningful then you write better. So, we start out buy helping you to mine topics on which you'd like to write, such as a meaningful experience that happened in your life. What do you love to do? What frightens you? What is a place you really love...or don't? With what character do you most identify in your favorite movie? Or if you could pick a research topic - something to explore more deeply because you feel passionate about it - what would it be?

To write better is to know yourself better, and it's okay to take the time to do that. Through that process, you learn the skills to become better at assignments given to you by your own instructors. Also, we can find interesting and meaningful topics within stories your instructor has assigned.

Answer 2

I agree with the two answers here already by Carmen and Destiny. I also want to add that maybe the process you have been taking doesn't stimulate your mind. For example, if your usual process is to just start writing and see what comes out, you could try writing an outline first and see how that goes. If you've been writing an outline first, start your next essay by just dumping all your thoughts out, then see what you can do with them once they are all out on the page.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a lot of people tend to overcomplicate the process, and end up overwhelming themselves. When you think of an idea you want to put on the page, write it as simply as you can and don't even worry about style at that point. Complicated sentence structures and big words should only be used when necessary.

Importantly, editing and revising are the true MVPs of the whole process. A rough draft is almost never any good, and it usually takes at least three drafts to get a paper to the point of being something worth reading. Because of this, I want to really emphasize the point I made about just getting your ideas on the page in the simplest form possible... you'll have plenty of time to change the way things are worded later.

You can be good at writing, but it does take time to hone this craft. If you work hard to improve your writing and you just find it to be tedious and incompatible with your true strengths, that's okay. If you really hate it, it's okay to just do it well enough to get the grade you need. What's important is that you learn something from the process of improvement.

With regards to understanding literature, the issue could be that you are reading it too fast or that you are reading stories that are uninteresting to your tastes. If you simply find the books you're reading for class uninteresting, you can try to get through it by researching the authors and historical contexts of the stories. That can give you a new vantage of them, and maybe even provide insight into why they were written.

The number one question you should ask yourself when analyzing literature is: Why did the author write this story? In other words, what insight are they trying to share? A good start to answering this question is to pay attention to how it makes you feel. If it doesn't make you feel anything, try to figure out what the author wanted you to feel. Imagine they are a bard standing in front of you telling you a lengthy tale--How are they looking at you? What is their intention?

Lastly: Reading will make you better at writing, and writing will make you better at reading.

Thanks for your question. I hope this helps!

Answer 3

I agree with Carmen's response.

Here are a few additional tips based upon my personal experience as well as my teaching and tutoring experience:

1. I have found that the more you read and expose yourself to other people's writing, the better you become at writing.
2. In addition to reading more, you might want to consider writing more outside of your class assignments. Excellent writers write often, whether it is in a diary, for a personal blog, or writing down their thoughts about current events.
3. Lastly, figure out which aspects of writing you would like to work on, and focus on one aspect at a time. Maybe this week you'd like to focus on organization of information, and next week you'd like to focus on diversifying your vocabulary, and the week after that, you want to focus on improving your grammar.

Writing well is difficult work, and with time, you can improve.