Transcript Lesson 25 Essentials Video: Student Videos and Sample Papers

GRETCHEN: I think what most professors should tell their students is to read a lot because that's actually how I think I became a better writer. It wasn't from the long assignments I did in high school and the long term papers on the Opium Wars. I think it was the reading I did on the side. And in college, it's hard to read on your own, but even if you can just read The New Yorker or the New York Times or any magazine or just have a good news diet, it helps you become a better writer because you see how other people write.

LINDSEY: I were to give myself advice, I would say that I should go back and read other people's papers that were about the topic or the genre that I'm doing because it's hard to write that first paper that sort of paper without ever having seen one like that.

VINH-THUY: For my very first essay, I wrote it in kind of a introduction, three body paragraphs, and conclusion. And she said, you know, this is great. You know, this is great, but it's a really boring way to write. And it's not—it's not the way that real writers—or no, she didn't use that word. It's not the way that professional writers would write.

And I thought, well, OK. That's why I went back to the textbook and read up on all the different essays and I finally saw that it was true. It's not how you would write an essay. An essay—is more about just being—an essay's not a math formula. You don't just plug numbers in and get an answer. It doesn't work that way.

DEONTA: I enjoyed collaborative writing because the groups are so diverse that you get—you learn a lot of new vocabulary, you learn new styles of writing, you see how other people write and how their thought process works out. So it's a great opportunity to take advantage of, and it's also helped me improve my writing when I do it by myself because I've learned so many things from other people that really helped me improve as a writer.

NICOLE: You know what? A teacher doesn't necessarily have to be someone in the classroom, and I'm a firm believer of that. Everyone is a teacher, and everyone is a student. So you know, you have your friends, you have your acquaintances, you have your peers, you even have strangers that you have random conversations with. And all of that can be a teachable moment or a lesson that you needed to learn.

STACY: And so I started with the first community college. And like I said, I hated reading. I hated writing. To me, it was a punishment. And so I had to learn how to adapt to things that I would like to read. So I started reading about people like me, people who've been what I've been through and done what I did. But I didn't know they were—that that kind of stuff was written in the book. And so I was able to really find a lot of information with a lot of people just like me. And it helped me to bridge over to the projects that I was assigned to in my English classes.

All my English professors, for me, were patient, understanding, very helpful. And I think my first English professor—I forget her name—was a lady at Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester. And she is the one who helped me to understand that my story is worth telling and that I am a good person and that I do know what I'm doing, I just have to give myself a break.

And I thought that was so awesome. That was the thing to get me going. And so she started—she understood who I was so she gave me projects according to who I am, and she helped me to learn about people like Faith Ringgold and Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. And that really interested me. I was like, OK. So there is other areas of reading that I can venture to that are cool, that that fit me, too. And so, OK.

And so from then I just loved to read, and I just—but I couldn't really get the words together to write. I didn't know how to put a paragraph together. I didn't know how to put a sentence together. I didn't—and I was ashamed to ask anybody. You couldn't get me to—because most people in my class now—I waited 30 years—were younger than me.

So I was embarrassed to ask—have any peers or any classmates help me. I always went to the lab and tried to pick maybe a professor to help me instead of a student, you know? And for the most part, in the beginning, it didn't work because I had to—the people who were helping me in the labs were students. So I had to put my pride aside and just go in and sit down with a couple of them and ask the questions that I didn't know because the only stupid question, I understood, was one that I didn't ask.

And so as I began to ask more questions, I began to get better at writing and understanding what I'm writing and how to put things in order and how to make up a sentence, how to make a paragraph, how to stay on a topic, how to go in chronological order. All that stuff started to make sense to me. But in the beginning, it was such a struggle for me. But I'm doing it now, and I love it.