To be honest, I have always loved to write. In elementary school I admired how documents like the Declaration of Independence and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech defined and redefined what freedom meant to Americans. Later, I grew to appreciate how the writers of my favorite cartoon shows, such as Recess, Teen Titans, Static Shock, etc. had made these awesome animated characters come to life. Writing was a way to bring a piece of your imagination to life! In my spare time I wrote stories about kids with superpowers who could time travel, see the future, and freeze time.
But all good things must end: as I progressed from one grade to another, my writing became more and more academically oriented. Then I went to high school and my creative juices really began drying up. By the time I was a senior and taking a full load of advanced classes, the only time I had time to write was when I was analyzing literature or creating history reports. My teachers trained us to write strong thesis statements, maintain a clear direction in our papers, and properly cite sources in MLA format. Overtime, this academic method of writing became natural to me. This has been great for my GPA, but pretty awful for everything else. The papers I turn in to professors are usually well-thought out and properly cited, but they’re also boring, formulaic, and tedious. Unfortunately, I can’t turn this writing style off easily. If we could eat publications and taste them like we taste food, most of my leisure writing would be the flavor of an old textbook. I’m tired of my writing sounding dull. My close friend told me that in person I have a good sense of humor, but that I can come off really pretentious and overly-academic in my writing. I honestly have to say I agree with him. The thing is, I was taught to write this way: naturally my writing was imaginative, engaging, and uniquely mine. Now, I sound a lot more like the other students that were taught to create strong thesis statements, proofread for punctuation and grammar errors, and otherwise write like a ‘good writer’.
Well, I’m tired of writing like a good writer: I’d rather write like a Darian. It’s a shame I barely even know what that means anymore. A lot of my peers faced similar levels of disillusionment in fields that they felt passionate about as children. Visual art, music, dancing, and theater can all be taught to, or taught out of a student. In terms of writing, it’s always been interesting to me that we look to certain conventions as elements of ‘good writing’, but we fail to recognize the beautiful diversity that may or may not fall into those conventions. Writers like Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison often blended dialogue and sentence structures that were influenced by Ebonics into their writing: yet all of them have been celebrated as amazing writers. Authors like Junot Diaz and Barbara Park (the late author of the Junie B. Jones series) also created beautiful pieces of literature that used unconventional grammatical styles at times. I wish we could take the stigma off of unconventional art styles long enough for students to learn to actually love to write (or draw, sing, dance, and act) in their own style. We shove perfection down students’ throats so much that many become proficient writers, and many learn to lose themselves in the process. I hope this changes in the years to come.
