The Writer I Am (Assignment#1)

   Every year, every semester, I find myself facing the same task: 'describe who I am'. Never in my life, however, have I been asked the question "what kind of writer are you?" This question totally blew me off, since I've never really considered that. All those years of TOEFL essays and other writings, and I still had absolutely no idea what kind of writer I was. That shock got me digging into my old essays, those buried under loads of paper, into the cyber folders that I totally forgot about. Despite some change over the years, I found three most common features in most of the essays: one, they are very aggressive. Two, they strive to be humorous. Three, they are colloquial.

     Often, people who read my essays say that I write quite aggressively. Just today, as I was writing the final defending speech with some of my co-defendants, they argued that my final defending speech wouldn’t work if I kept on expressing my anger and frustration toward the situation. They explained the need for me to 'calm down' in my essay. I could not have agreed more. In an objective view, I myself can clearly see how upset I sound in my writings. It feels like a rhyme-less Eminem rap. The reason my essays have an 'angry' tone is probably because I feel an obsession to prove myself inside an essay. I am frustrated because I am worried that the others won't understand what I am saying. One good example would be my closing statement at mock trials. I, as a defense attorney, insult every move that the police had made, and explain why prosecution has failed terribly.

           Another style of writing I employ is humor. While being aggressive, I try to balance it off with humor so that my readers won’t just deem my writings as a lengthy complaint. I am, don’t be surprised, a fun-loving person. I love putting jokes and a few subtle sarcasms in my writings. I can’t be sure whether my sense of humor is a universal one, but my writings are certainly coated with jokes and sarcasms. A fit example would be my Johnson term-papers where I had to restrain myself from putting more jokes into the thing and turning it into a joke book rather than a term-paper.

           Finally, I write colloquially. I write like I am taking note of a conversation. I write like I am literally talking to the readers, face to face. This writing style was formed because I tend to double check my writings by reading it and checking to make sure that it sounds natural. As a person that is not native to this language, I have a hard time making sure that no grammatical error is made. Reading it makes it much easier for me to find the errors, and soon, the technique landed itself firmly repeatedly. As a result, this double checking method influenced my writing style as a whole. For example, in my essay "Change? Not only for the better.” I write like I am talking to to the person on the other side.
         I love the way I write. It exactly demonstrates the kind of person I am: fun-loving, enthusiastic, and talkative. There are, yes, certain problems with my style of writing. Aggressive, humorous, and colloquial writings tend to sound informal. They show too much emotions-they are often said to be a style unfit for the academics. Therefore, it is my goal to improve and prove that I can, with my style of writing, achieve certain highness in the academics as well.