After beginning On Writing Well, by William Zinsser, I started reflecting on my life as someone who’s always considered herself a writer. My earliest memories involve me having some kind of journal, where I’d write about my days at school and talk about memorable moments that I wanted to remember. As time passed, these moments ranged from concerts, holidays, vacations, the birth of my sister (my favorite—I was 12, and it was on Easter that year), graduations, breakups, and everything in between.
Over the years, I began adding pictures into my journals. I’d print them from my phone, take Polaroids, and kept receipts or other memorabilia to glue into the pages. Some of my favorite pages to look back on are where I kept to-do lists. I’m able to look back on not only what I was thinking about that day, but what I had to do. My to-do lists from high school are vastly different from my to-do lists now. I love being able to see the natural progression of my own life.
In high school, I enjoyed writing essays and English assignments. My school was very small, with not many teachers, so I had the same English teacher my freshman and senior year—Ms. Williams. She was always serious and came off a bit cold at times, but you could tell that there was warmth beneath the surface. I think I’d only seen her laugh a handful of times. She cared about what she taught and it showed.
Ms. Williams ingrained a few rules about writing in my brain that I will probably never forget. We could never use first person in our writing. It felt so freeing anytime I’d had an assignment where first person was allowed. She taught us how to structure a thesis at the end of an introduction, and we had to follow this format no matter what:
“One can see why/how this argument is true (for example) by analyzing xyz.”
That used to frustrate me. One? Who is that? In On Writing Well, Zinsser, he states, “I don’t want to meet “one”—he’s a boring guy.” She also hated when we used the word “it” as she felt it was unclear. For example:
Ms. Williams was also the only teacher to give me a detention for going to the beach on senior skip day. On Writing Well has me questioning rules about writing that I believed to be true. I’ve never read a book about writing, so maybe his opinions aren’t necessarily unique, but they’re new to me. I’m excited to continue reading this book and learning more about writing to become a better writer. So far, I’ve learned that it doesn’t have to be that serious. Write for you, not an imaginary audience. I’m thankful I have years of journals to look back on and know I’ve improved as a writer since my middle school journals, maybe thanks to Ms. Williams.
Mia Krysa 