"It is not the ctitic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

~Theodore Roosevelt

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Dear Essay...

Dear five-paragraph essay of my public education,

You suck. Yes, you made it so easy to write an essay in middle and high school. Though, you were very redundant and boring you helped fill the pages. But you are now a terrible thing for me to be used to and I detest that fact.

Eighth grade. Mr. Richardson's US History class. Fall of 2004. That's when I learned "Say what you're going to say. Say it. Say it again." Such a simple concept. Of course it had to be too simple, huh?

Now I sit in my college classes trying to figure out how to write an essay. Yep, I'm an English major. Ya, apparently I still don't know how to write an essay. It is a very sad fact. One that I must cope with.

How to make a clear, pointed thesis statement without saying what I'm going to say? How do I not make it redundant? How did I get through all these years assuming the thesis statement always goes at the end of the first paragraph? Well, okay, we learned about thesis statements one day when I missed school. Maybe that's why I have such problems...
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