Post 7: High School Writing to College Writing
Making the transition to college life can be difficult, but have you ever tried to make the transition to college level writing?
College academics can vary in many ways when it comes to staying on top of your work and advocating for yourself. In high school, you find yourself being encouraged by teachers and/or parents to get your work done which is not a luxury you will ever find yourself having in college. The professors want to see you win, but they can't force you to win. If you aren't willing to put in the work, why should they?
See graphic posted below, these are a few of the main differences between college and high school that can make or break you:
More specifically - english class which we can use the same examples to apply to the scenario. Personally I find that in a high school English class you find yourself worrying more about paragraph structure and "dead words" which you may have heard if growing up in an American public high school. These structures tend to be more or less not as concerned about in college writing as long as you follow guidelines outlined by the professor when it comes to grammar.
A major find you will run into with the difference between high school and college writing is citing sources. This is not outlined in a normal high school writing what so ever. It was made clear that plagiarism was not allowed, however citing a source used in a book, website, or other piece of material was not needed to be cited in any written document that was formatted. This you will find as a huge change to college writing.
In a piece written by Kate McKinney Maddalena, “I need you to say ‘I’”: Why First
Person Is Important in College
Writing the writer explains to us why first person writing is important in college writing. It is mentioned, "But writing in various academic and professional contexts needs
to be more flexible, sophisticated, and subtle than writing for high
school English classes. In college, you should start using first-person
pronouns in your formal academic writing, where appropriate." As you can read by her piece, writing college papers have sound more sophisticated and at the same time you have to be able to include writing that is enjoyable to readers and sound less of a "mind numbing robot" that nobody cares to read or has time for.
College writing is not the same as your "norm" you are used to and can be a hard change for many students. Ensuring that you are understanding the change can make a huge influence on your life as from personal experience a lot of writers in formal settings do not have this skill. Unbeknownst to why the reasoning is, even after taking extensive college English writing classes, some still struggle to understand the change.
For me, the transition from high school to college has been quite an experience, and it's shown me that no one is holding my hand when it comes to school. I've learned to be more independent and how to manage my classes and help is always available, so I'm not completely lost.
ReplyDeleteIn high school we had to cite our sources as we got into the higher grades like 11th and 12th but it wasn't graded as strictly as it is in college. I always knew about the websites you can use to cite them correctly but was never taught about "hanging indents" or putting them in alphabetical order. As different as college writing is from high school, if you look closely they can also be very similar. High school kind of prepped us for what is to come in college but in a more simple way.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to see how different (or similar) people's experiences with high school English classes were. My experience was eerily similar to yours, and I was homeschooled, whereas you went to public high school. However, based on the blogs I've read and these comments, that was not everyone's experience. Your use of the illustration at the beginning of this blog post was excellent, and I think it really drives some good points home about the significant differences between the high school and college experience.
ReplyDelete