What You Have to Say is Important

I have been taking AP English classes all throughout high school and it has taught me skills that I use in unexpected ways. Synthesis essays taught me how to look at different pieces of media and see how they influence each other, and literary analysis essays taught me how to look for the meaning of a literary work in the subtle details the author puts in. These are invaluable skills that are a result of the hours of extra effort I put into my studies over those in regular English, but they do come with a downside. Often times you are writing for an academic professional who will be judging your work on its literary merit, so you are encouraged to drop the voice you usually talk in and instead write in an academic tone. This works wonders in making you sound smarter than you are, but more often than not, it works to stop out your own individualism. You become a vessel for interpreting what the author of a literary work means rather than embracing your unique mindset and writing about things important to you. This was at its worst, at least for me personally, and the 11 English AP test essays. When I go back and read those essays, they sound, empty. It doesn't sound any different from the essays that any other person could've written, I just happened to be the one to write them. I felt like a machine, like a carefully programmed piece of technology designed to do a certain task in a certain way. It felt degrading.

That was, until this year. One of the first things you do in 12 English AP is to write your college essays to submit. It allows you to express yourself in your writing, using the tools you've gained to write about something that you enjoy writing about. It feels freeing, showing you the skills that school teaches you rather than the specific task they teach you to do. It allows you to think completely on your own, showing to colleges that you haven't been mindlessly doing the work, but have been learning from it. On top of this, our midterm essay topic was completely up to us. Despite the few rules we had to follow, you could write about anything you wanted. It sparked that love of writing that I hadn't really felt since writing our mystery stories in 8th grade. I got to just sit down, enjoy writing, and talk about an issue that was personal to me. It showed me that what I had to say was important enough to hear.