The
Directed Self Placement essay required one to respond to an article on high
school sports in relation to academic success. This was a tricky prompt for me
to respond to as I never played sports in high school and, therefore, could not relate to the essay. I chose to argue that, although high school
sports do cause distraction, they are a tradition that unites and supports
communities.
I ran into a number of challenges
while attempting to write my DSP essay. First, I had a hard time pinpointing
exactly what the author’s point was throughout her article. I found her
argument to be unorganized and a bit unclear. Some points I was in agreement with, while others I completely disagreed with. Second, I usually like to pull from personal
experience to arrive at a conclusion for an argument; however, I have no direct
relationship with high school sports whatsoever. I never engaged in a sport in high school and, furthermore, my high school did not even
have a football team. Therefore, I decided to draw from my experience with an
extra curricular activity that I am passionate about and why that was necessary in
my growth throughout high school. Lastly, I found that the prompt was very
limiting and, therefore, stifled creativity and did not give the opportunity to
demonstrate an imaginative approach. As someone who has always preferred
creative writing, I struggled with the restricted possibilities of writing this
essay.
I began completing the assignment by
reading thoroughly and analyzing the article. Next, I decided on a thesis
statement and outlined how I wanted to organize my argument. I chose which
quotes I wanted to use and found outside research to help bolster my argument. This
part of the assignment went smoothly; however, once it came to actually writing
the essay, I experienced more difficulty.
The primary issue was that I had
procrastinated so much that I had to complete the entire assignment in one
sitting. Procrastination has always been one of my worst qualities; however,
time and time again I still choose to leave assignments until the last possible
second. My short attention span, combined with a disinterest in the topic of
the essay, lead to an internal struggle of how to get this essay over with as
quickly as possible. This came across in my disinterested tone and the lack of
an organized and concise argument.
The final product of this assignment
was certainly not my best writing. As the essay went on, my writing got
progressively worse and worse. I felt as though I had used up my most compelling arguments in the first half of the essay. I still had a number of pages to complete but had no new information; therefore, my essay felt very repetitive and redundant. Furthermore, I only had a matter of a few hours to
finish the assignment, and I could not afford to take any breaks. I was stuck to my
chair for what felt like days. My only concern was completing the essay and
having one less thing to worry about.
Unfortunately, I do not feel as
though I learned much from the Directed Self Placement essay. The
writing I had done in high school felt much more challenging, as well as
interesting, than this one. However, one thing in particular that I did noticed in the completion
of this essay was my obsessive nature to make the first draft the best one. I
cannot simply put down my thoughts on paper and come back to it later. I will
fixate on the best way to write one sentence for twenty minutes rather than mapping out the entire essay and fixing small details such as wording and transitions later. This
debilitates my writing because my intro will be very clear and concise, but
once I realize I do not have much time left, the rest of my essay suffers. If I had allowed more time to write the
essay, or even had someone else workshop it, the essay could have been much
more successful.
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