12/20/2022

I started this semester with the thought that the act of writing is akin to cooking a steak, and I will end with the same thought, yet, no longer limited to the steak itself. The quality and experience with the pan you use to sear steak can be translated into the pen, or digital software, you use to write. Without the pan, you don’t have a steak, and without the right setup, I wouldn’t have these essays.

I am most fond of my first essay, The Secret Password, where I wrote about my personal experience with not sharing the same native tongue as the rest of my family. Although it doesn’t have the highest grade, I found that I was able to accomplish something that I haven’t previously, honestly write about myself. This isn’t to say that I never wrote about my personal life, but that I never really wrote about what was going on in my mind, and with this essay being a personal narrative, I was granted an opportunity to do so. However, I don’t think I would’ve been able to do so if not for the software I used. I found writing these essays in Microsoft Word, while not being an amazing piece of software, to be oddly natural. Perhaps it’s the fact that, in my case, the background is dark while my text is white, which is strains my eyes less. Yet, I would write with paper and pen if that was my only problem, which isn’t the case since I’m typing this, and that ties into the next tool that helped with my writing, the keyboard.

One of my longtime hobbies is programming, which can’t be done with paper and pen. Typing line after line of code has made typing a comfortable way for me to write. Maybe it’s simply because I’ve grown accustomed to it or typing reminds me of the hobby I enjoy, but either way, it has helped with the quality of my writing. There’s also the case that typing provides a lot more convenience than paper and pen, however the convenience to simply delete a word wouldn’t make using the keyboard a comfortable experience for me. Erasable pens are convenient, but that doesn’t make writing essays on pen and paper comfortable.

Provided that I enjoyed my writing equipment, the experience I had with it is equally as important. Most of my time writing a five-page paper would be spent on fumbling with every keystroke, struggling to undo a typo, or Googling how to double space my paper if I didn’t already have that experience. Naturally, spending less time on my essays wouldn’t make for an enjoyable read, sort of how like spending most of your time struggling with the oven wouldn’t make for a great steak. It takes skill to make a great steak, but you can’t hone those skills if you don’t understand the tools you’re using.