Note: My 2012 self wrote this. It’s a bit dated, but it’s okay, and also is of historical interest for featuring me explaining the CSS I learned from English class.
Every time I notice that I have hoarded a large number of strange assignments and essays from another school year of work I get all guilty. First there’s the knowledge about ancient Chinese dynasties and plant hormones that I only have shadows of recollections of, which makes me wonder whether all the time and effort invested by teachers, classmates, and myself have gone wasted.
I know, though, that given that I still sense these shadows, it shouldn’t be difficult to look up and relearn this stuff if I ever need to do so. This brings me to the non-factual parts of the learning, such as writing skills with all its variations. There’s persuasive writing, which I don’t use much because I can’t usually even persuade myself to take a side in anything, let alone others. There’s descriptive writing mode, which I don’t use much because the most vividly describable things I encounter are food, and the shallowness of piling flowery adjectives together to talk about food just makes me cringe nowadays. Previously, I wrote at least two such compositions in sixth grade. Blech.
I think all those school essays are supposed to count for one mode, and that my dozen-or-so assignments should have honed my skill somehow, but I feel like instead of actually trying to express ideas, I’ve really been taking the thesis-evidence-analysis pattern and filling in corresponding blanks. That’s definitely not what I think writing correctly should feel like. What do I know for sure that I’ve learned? No contractions are allowed under MLA format. There is a not-quite-standard CSS unit ch that represents the width of the zero glyph. Maybe, just maybe, I look out more carefully for wordy constructions.
I also have written a significant number of math solutions, but fully describing that in relation to everything else would involve going off on such a tangent (…sorry) that I’ll just skip it. And finally there’s this idea-vomiting mode I adopt for this blog that I have no idea how to refine, mainly because I’m not sure what I’m trying to accomplish with it.
Well, other than put off homework, of course.