In Ray’s article, she says at one point, “The struggle to organize and make everything work together is there anew every time. It is an essential part of the writing process”. This quote really stuck with me. Writing is so often taught in the five paragraph essay structure, and as Ray points out, that kind of writing doesn’t exist in the world outside of school. I was always taught the five paragraph essay, and for a long time, being good at it was super convenient. Writing that way provides you with a rigid structure. It makes the writing process a matter of filling in the blanks. Start with a general statement. Narrow it down to your thesis. Topic sentence, example, reasoning. Topic sentence, example, reasoning. Topic sentence, example, reasoning. Restate your thesis. Work back to something general. Done. Writing this was also made the process of reading more like a word-search. When I read, I tried to find the right content to fill in the blanks in my essay.

When I got to Vassar I really struggled to write well. I knew that writing five paragraph essays wasn’t going to cut it. Instead of changing the structure of my writing, though, I just added paragraphs. I started writing ten paragraph essays, simply adding more meat in between the intro and conclusion. This still didn’t work. After reading this article, I realized that the reason for my inability to adapt was that I was being given a rigid structure to write in. The most exciting and challenging part of writing, for me, is taking all of my ideas, all of the patterns I noticed in a text, all of my connections to other texts, and find a way to connect them all. Instead of finding quotes and putting them into an already determined structure, you have to take an extra step, do more work, and build that structure yourself. Writing like this embodies the kind of processing we do all the time. We move through the world taking the things we see and think and restructuring our ideologies to make everything fit. When we write like that, the process of writing mirrors the process of living. Being able to “organize and make everything work together” is useful in every field, and I think that teaching writing in a way that encourages students to build their own structures and find creative, alternative ways to organize their argument can get students more engaged and make the writing process more genuinely productive.