Plays Well With Others

Expressive Writing …

Every now and then, random memories from way back when pop into my head. I don’t know what triggers them, but there they sit. Sometimes I share them through an entry, other times I just let them go.

Throughout high school, I was always in more advanced english courses. That doesn’t mean I always did well in english class, just that I did BETTER than I did in my other classes. I liked writing. That doesn’t mean I was great at it or anything, just that I liked it and got fairly good grades when it came to writing. How can you go wrong. You just express an opinion, put it into a fairly easy to remember structure and let it flow — unlike math, where you are stuck to postulates and theorems to get your work done.

For me, though, writing is a solo activity. I don’t want someone reading over my shoulder while I write and I don’t want to share what I’ve written until it’s complete. It’s definately not a team or group activity. Of course when you are in school, teachers love to create teamwork activities and in my freshman year of high school I was teamed up with someone for a writing project.

The project was to write about a poster of Yosemite that was on the wall of the classroom. The idea was that, even if you hadn’t ever been there, to write about it as if you were standing in the middle looking around, describing in detail what you were seeing.

I was teamed up with a girl that I could tell was less than enthusiastic about being paired up with me. We sat down and began taking notes about what we should write about and she began scribbling madly on her sheet of paper, while I sat there trying to wrap my head around the project. Neither of us had been anywhere near Yosemite and had no idea what it looked like, other than what we saw in the poster. She was a note taker, I was a thinker. I like to sit and just think about something before I jump in and start writing. In her eyes, I was just sitting there not really doing anything, not really being a part of the team. By the time the class ended for the day, I’d written virtually nothing, while she had an entire page of notes written down. She handed them to me, mentioning that if I thought of anything to add them to her notes. I agreed.

That night, I began scribbling my rough draft of the project and by the end of the night, I’d rewritten it three or four times, which is normal for me. When I’m really writing, unlike this journal which is more of a free flow type of writing, I tend to write and rewrite my thoughts until they are polished and convey exactly the message I’m trying to get across. I don’t pull out dictionaries or thesauruses and don’t use overly complex vocabulary because in the end it just makes it hard to read. In my opinion, if you are a good writer, you don’t need complex vocabulary to get your point across because a really good writer is able to convey the same or even clearer message using simpler tools. Regardless, when I’m really writing, going through three or four or more drafts is usual. By the end of the night, I had my nearly finished piece.

I arrived to class the next day and my partner asked if I had any notes, to which I handed her my draft. Her jaw dropped. I really don’t think she believed that I would have done anything for the project, let alone, actually write out the entire draft. Together we made a couple of quick revisions and handed it in. She was impressed with what I’d done.

The next day, the teacher handed back all the papers but ours, saying that we’d all done a good job. She then posted a paper on the board and explained that one stood out from all others and that it was not only an “A” paper but that she wanted to read it aloud so that everyone else could hear it. It was our paper. Really, MY paper, but as a team we both took credit. I didn’t really care, because that wasn’t really the point. I knew that it was my paper up there on the board being read aloud to the entire class with the teacher gushing about how great it was. Even my teammate couldn’t help but acknowledge that it was really MY paper and that all she’d done was change a couple of words. It was a really nice feeling. Not so much that we’d gotten an “A” for the paper, but that I was able to show my partner that even though I might not have helped much with the notes, in the end I was able to put the paper together on my own.

I’ve received other “A’s” on papers in both high school and in college, but for some reason that one stands out. I think I even still have it in a box at the top of my closet full of other school related items. The page is tattered and torn, handwritten more than a decade ago, still showing our revisions. For some reason, I’ve held onto it.

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