Welcome to Confessions of a 30 Year Old Drag Queen.
1/30/2020
This is a response to how my experience in High School either matched or didn’t match the gaps discussed in the blog post: “Bridging the Writing Gap: Centering Student Voices in High School and College Writing.”
I have to admit that it’s difficult for me to accurately gauge how my High School experiences matched up to these because I graduated High School 15 years ago, so my memory of what I had learned that long ago has some major gaps. However, as far as I can remember, these are the responses I have to each of these things:
The Citation Gap – personally, I never learned anything other than MLA from high school into college. Even in college level work, I rarely used anything other than MLA.
The Choice Gap – The only time I wrote anything unprompted was in a class through Syracuse University for an AP Sociology class. Other than that, it was all based-on prompts.
The Template Gap – Other than my AP class, every essay was a 5-paragraph essay. The only variation in high school was a 25-page final in my AP Sociology class. In college, it was all 3-page minimums with 5 pages being the average requirement.
Evidence Gap – To this day, it’s the only way I know how to cite sources.
The Style Gap – I was taught paragraphs were 4-5 sentences long, until college when I realized how to write more to the idea than the format.
The Mode Gap – This was never really taught to me; I just saw each as a different form of writing.
The Revision Gap – I still have issues with this, to be honest. I am not good at essay revision. I was never effectively taught this skill.
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Confessions of a 30-something year old Drag Queen 
4 replies on “Home”
Interesting and honest thoughts, thanks. I think your experience matches many others. We’ll learn lots of other ways to prompt and address a broader range of writing and writing tasks this semester.
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I agree with your perspective on these issues. Although I graduated high school four years ago, we had very similar experiences and were taught comparable skills that may have actually hindered our writing in our futures. I was also taught that paragraphs should be 4 to 5 sentences long. In college, my paragraphs are usually double that and sometimes more. It is interesting to look back and see how unprepared high school actually makes us for college. I remember the dreaded 5 paragraph essay and it’s crazy to look back at how my writing style has changed since I’ve had more freedom in college, and I’m sure you can relate. I look forward to reading more of your blog posts.
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Without a doubt, these are the experiences of many students all over the United States. So many students struggle with writing because they aren’t taught all the different methods of the skill. I think as potential teachers we need to work on a much broader style of teaching writing to students, not just what will be on their standardized tests. What I find really interesting is that even though you graduated fifteen years ago this is still how students are being taught. I came out of high school four years ago and I have many of the same problems that you listed above.
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Jeff, some of what you posted also matches up with what I experienced in high school. When I was in high school, I was never asked to write umprompted, and it honestly was confusing to me as to why we couldn’t. Had I been able to, I would’ve been challenged more like a younger student. Also, I never cited anything other than MLA, and when I got to Stony Brook, I was asked to cite APA in Psychology and had no idea how to do it. Sure, there are sites, but there are sites that show several editions of how to cite in APA.
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