Procrastination, Insomnia, and College Writing
Woman; Black; Middle Class; 1991 (2011-04-11)
>>JARUNE UWUJAREN: When I was in my last semester of senior year in high school I had an AP Lit class, English Literature, and I had to write a six page report on a book called, I think it was – I don't remember the title of the book, but I do remember that it was the final project of the year. Before I finished this project the teacher was warning us that we could not spend the night before the assignment was due, trying to finish the assignment and trying to do the whole thing; we needed to prepare, we needed to outline, we need to do all these things. She gave us guidelines to do it but she never took anything off. So, long story short, this teacher warned us that when we got to college, we would never be able to do that again, and by that I mean procrastinate on a paper and write it the night before. So, of course being the high school student that I was, I still did that paper the night before and having not read about half of the book, I brought it to class and still was able to get the assignment in on time. That is because I was more concerned about grades than the writing process and that is what I want to talk about today: how being concerned with grades rather than the writing process influenced the way I wrote papers in college and the way I kind of skipped parts of the writing process just in order to have a deliverable for the teacher so I could get my grade and go home and be done with it. 
>>JARUNE UWUJAREN: After that high school year I went onto college, didn't take the teacher's advice and continued to kind of procrastinate on all of my assignments. Something I noticed about that is that literature classes don't really take into account how things are written. There is not real way to test your progress, they very seldom have peer review in literature classes; they are all about the analysis of the literature. So if you turn something in you basically get a grade for turning something in. You don't really get a grade for how you did it or you don't really get instruction on how to do it. So by the time I got to junior year, I had developed the habit of writing from literature classes where I pretty much just sit down and take all my research, write the entire paper in like three hours, and after that turn it in. Don't look at it, don't touch it, don't prewrite, don't really revise it, and I was missing a huge part of the writing process when I was doing that. 
>>JARUNE UWUJAREN: By the time I got to junior year I was kind of forced out of this habit by rhetoric classes and conversation classes where the teacher, instead of just kind of saying "Turn in the project at the end of such-and-such a time", he was like "Bring your thing in for peer review!" or you know "Two weeks before the due date bring this in!" and have the teacher comment on it or your peers. That kind of brought me out of the habit of constantly doing things at the last minute. Because of that I realized that I really have no revision process. If I want to go back over a paper I don't want to touch it. It is like when you do a final exam and you just rush through the multiple choice and don't look at it again because you know you are going to second guess yourself, that is how it is for me. That is pretty much how I – sorry. 
>>JARUNE UWUJAREN: One of the things I had to do this year was do an assignment on Nancy Sommers and a study she did on how people revise. That is how I realized that my process of writing sucked. So that is basically my story so far. If you guys have any questions, you can ask them, I guess. No questions? That's good. Thanks!