The Two Hardest Writing Disciplines

                Over the course of my education, I have written all sorts of essays, including argumentative, cause and effect, narrative, expository, and persuasive essays.  However, it seemed that creative writing projects and research papers were the most popular pieces among my elementary, high school, and college professors.  While my teachers tended to enjoy assigning creative writing assignments and research papers, students, along with myself, felt the opposite.  Students dread writing, especially when writing research papers and completing creative writing assignments, mainly because they are the most difficult out of the many writing disciplines.

               The term “creative writing” basically speaks for itself.  It is a type of writing that is creative, meaning the writer must solely use his or her imagination, which makes creative writing a challenging task.  Some students are wildly creative, while other students don’t have an imaginative bone in their body.  The formal definition for creative writing is “any writing, fiction or non-fiction that goes outside the bounds of normal, professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature’.  Some examples of creative writing include novels, epic poetry, short stories, and poems.  Screenwriting and playwriting also fall under the category of creative writing.

If I were to define creative writing in my own words, I would describe it as writing from the heart.  Creative writing doesn’t rely on scholarly information or any factual information for that matter.  It only relies on one thing; and that one thing is your brain, which is why creative writing can be so difficult for certain people.  Some people are not born with a creative mind and as a result, they struggle with these types of assignments.  Creative writing also entails expressing one’s own thoughts, feelings, and emotions, which is another thing that people struggle to do.  An excellent example of a creating writing project would be the digital storytelling project that we had to complete for this class.  A group of students were required to get together to create a story of their own.  I was part of the first group to produce a page for the digital storytelling project and I personally found it hard to devise up a story that the remaining groups in the class had to feed off of.  I like to think of myself as creative, but unfortunately, the imaginative thoughts are sometimes not there.

 

           Research papers are completely different than creative writing projects.  A professional definition of a research paper is “a type of academic writing that presents one’s own interpretation or evaluation or argument, with the help of research, scholarly journals, or existing reviews”.  Research papers are challenging to write due to the fact that research papers require you to search and find information outside of your own personal thoughts and insights. 

An obvious example of a research project would be the final analytical research paper that we are required to write for the end of the semester.  We were able to pick a topic of our choosing and had to devise up an argument of our own and support it with scholarly information.  I personally dislike writing research papers and I find them difficult to write, due to the time it takes to write them.  I know that the majority of my fellow peers would agree with me when I say that research papers are a hassle and are a pain to write.

 

            The main point of my argument is that students dislike the art of writing, primarily research and creative writing papers mainly because they require you to express your own thoughts, use your own imagination, and support your arguments using outside research.