Planning and Stress

Planning before writing a paper is a completely necessary step and is essential for a paper to be optimized. In Carol Berkenkotter’s article “Decisions and Revisions: The Planning Strategies of a Publishing Writer” I had a sad realization that my own planning has lacked throughout my writing. I think that if you are planning a paper correctly you will come out much farther ahead than if not. In the article when she wrote about revisions i had a strong realization that my own papers need more revisions. But I also realized that I plan just like the college students in her paper saying that most of the time you are writing you aren't writing at all, in fact you are thinking about what you will write.

I have a serious problem with planning too much when writing a paper if the paper has a lot of worth behind it. A situation that I have in the forefront of my mind was my junior year at Sentinel High School in Missoula. We had to take a writing assessment for college, the test was called the MUSWA (I believe it stood for Montana university system writing assessment). A major requirement for this assignment was to reach a certain word count which was a problem because I put much more time into having a quality paper than have a paper which was basically all filler. I was like a deer in the headlights when my teacher announced that there was  fifteen minutes left for us to write because I had much less written than I should have at that point. By the time the time limit had been completely finished I had half as much written as many people in my class and i realized it was going to hurt me down the road.

Writing this thought piece shows me the parallels between then and now. This thought piece has much less riding on it than that time my junior year and i have been able to not get locked up because i don't feel as if it needs to be perfect. Planning should not cause anxiety in fact it should cause confidence because you should know that your paper is a higher quality than it would have been. But because of time frames and due dates it can cause a lot of anxiety in a student (or maybe its just me).