When Mike Bunn writes “You are already an author”, I think he means exactly that; you are already an author. We have years of experience in writing, from school assignments, writing in our free time, emails, texts, writing when helping others, taking notes at work meetings, etc.
I enjoy writing poetry and journaling important events in my life. I became passionate in writing poetry when I read one of Emily Dickenson poetry books which contained a variety of her poems. I started journaling in junior high school because I wanted to one day write an autobiography. I still journal today and have books and books of important events in my life.
This existing expertise will help me in my college reading and writing career because I already enjoy reading and writing during my free time. Plus, the career path I am heading towards, is already what I do as far as work; construction project management with minor engineering work.
Some of the techniques I noticed in Bunn’s article that I would like to implement in my own writing is to first know what my writing assignment is ahead of time as well as writing in the margins. As mentioned in page 78 “Is this the kind of writing you will be assigned to write yourself?”, I agree with Bunn technique; knowing what kind of writing I have been assigned will help me prioritize what I am reading. Nevertheless, I will be able to mark up the text in correlation to the assignment. I am already a note taker and I highlight important text in the reading material, but knowing the writing assignment prior to reading the text, will help me highlight the important text for the assignment rather than what I think is important. I don’t typically write in the margin I always use my notebook to take notes. Moving forward I will be using this technique instead. It will be easier for me to look at the margin notes and connect it to the highlight since I will continue to highlight the text.
