Writing about MY writing

I have always taken pride in my writing, sure it isn’t the best out there but I am proud of most of my work. So for the past few semesters I had been doing my work. Reading it over and turning it in. What I would always be shocked by is the amount of times I was given feedback with marks up and down my paper, pointing out how many sentence fragments I had left in. This is a point of criticism I had never understood. I would read the sentences out loud and they would make perfect sense to me and anyone I would read them to. That leads us to this class. As it has taken me four years of college for someone to finally make me realize why I write like this. 

    It was during my meeting with professor Hanrahn that it all came together. She showed me several examples in my major project draft in which she called fragmented sentences. I was confused as I read them back in my head and it sounded completely normal. So out of pure confusion I finally asked what makes those examples fragment sentences specifically. After she had explained I was still confused as to what made me write like this. I had been writing academic essays for nearly six years now. You would think I would have learned by now. Yet I was utterly confused as to why I was doing this.

    Professor Hanrahn was the first person, after four years at Shepherd, to point out to me that I come from a communications major’s background, Film, TV, Radio to be more specific. I had been encouraged to write realistic dialogue for so long that I had forgotten how to write a proper formal essay. I was so focused on writing how I would say thing to a group of people that I had completely lost the context of the papers I had been writing, and I can’t believe it took a one sentence explanation for me to understand all of this. Of course it had to happen right when I was about to graduate. As I will more than like stop writing formal essays. At least I learned something new.