Reflective Essay On Writing Voice

Growing up in a small town where many people didn’t finish high school or go to college and most of the students around me weren’t avid learners, it was difficult to learn how to write a paper in my opinion. The main thing that has stuck with me was the first time I wrote an actual paper. I was in elementary school and they gathered all the students of my grade into the cafeteria and told us that we had to write an essay based off a prompt that they gave us. They also told us that we must have a strong and inviting introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a summary conclusion. After that, to my knowledge, I wasn’t really every taught about writing papers, just marked off when I did have a paper assignment and told what to do to fix

I remember my senior project was based off the idea of how to become president but to not include anything personal within the topic. The unfortunate part of all of this is that I don’t think that I completely understood the different of writing a paper in my “writers voice” or in my “speaking voice.” I have always written a paper in my speaking voice because I want my paper to sound how I talk. I have always found that this style made more sense to me because I could show my way of thinking and how deep I have thought about something. I would say that my main enculturation has been in just how to separate my thinking and apply barriers and filters but not in the best ways possible. It took until college for me to understand that the paper didn’t need somewhat irrelevant information for strength, but that it just needed more relevant information to get the full idea across. The only “taboo” things that I personally had to change was my grammar and word choice because I tend to say something while talking and write it down and it makes no sense when I re-read the paper. I also don’t think that I have ever learned how to create an outline properly for a