the development of my style

It’s hard to pinpoint how my style has changed over the years, other than to say that it has matured.  The content has moved from silly poems and stories about kids dealing with the same things I dealt with in high school to more complex ideas, but it isn’t easy to identify exactly how my style has changed. 

After looking at a few essays and creative pieces I’ve written throughout my college experience, I can see some development in how I stick to conventions.  As a freshman, I was armed with strict guidelines that had been drilled into my head about how to properly write an essay, what each sentence should look like, and what words I could never, ever use.  It was beaten in my brain that I wasn’t allowed to sound like me at all.  Of course, that was garbage.  Contractions and first person input were not going to make my essay implode.  When I started bending the rules in my academic writing, my creative writing shifted as well. 

In the beginning, my creative writing was kind of stilted.  I wrote how I thought I was supposed to be writing rather than how I actually felt I could be writing.  I used a lot of clichés and I was more interested in completing a plot than creating characters that were real and filling the story with meaning.  After a while, when my writing began to change, I played around with writing more like I actually thought and spoke.  I used fragments, added humor and sarcasm to my stories, and wrote dialogue that wasn’t all proper English. I started working with the senses when I realized how much more power there was in showing rather than telling.

A lot of this is just my own growth as a writer through the classes I’ve had to take for my major, but I think that before I took these classes, I never really tried to establish a certain voice.  I can’t say whether or not I’ve really reached the voice I’m trying to achieve for myself. I’d like to say that I’m a straightforward writer.  I don’t like to make things abstract or difficult to comprehend, but sometimes I write rambling sentences that reflect the way I think and seem to run on a little longer than necessary.  I even find myself falling victim to the Virginia Woolf-esque sentences I hate so much with too many commas and thoughts upon thoughts upon thoughts.  I don’t work to make my writing especially humorous, but I don’t filter my natural sarcastic tone.