[written for my 9th grade english teacher]
In general, I am a writer who is good at writing nonfiction and poetry. These particular categories have lots of structure, which seems to be important to me. For instance, I wrote very verbose descriptions of my thought process while doing some problems for $math_teacher, which she liked enough to post them on the bulletin board in her room, for the whole class. This form of writing, where I have a good guide to go by, seems to come easily to me. Similarly, I write poetry because its implicit structure gives me a base to work from, in terms of word choice and any particular subject I would like to talk about.
I approach writing in several ways. In my journal, which is kept encrypted on the hard drive of the computer in my room, I tend to write with a lot of slang/jargon, and in a rather unstructured, rambling way. When writing research papers, about research I did not conduct myself, I generally make an outline and then completely disregard it. Gernerally, my most successful writing is about research I did myself (as in the case of the math assignment), is poetry, or is really interesting to me. This reminds me of another point--in writing I am doing for myself, I tend to use parentheses quite a lot. My mother says I should develop the parenthesized stuff into complete sentences, but that is a lot of work for something I am doing for no reason in particular.
I usually write on my computer, often getting sidetracked into various interesting ideas about my computer. For instance, while writing this study, I stopped for a while and worked on improving my method of encryption for my diary. The specific method with which i wanted to improve my encryption was quite simple: after encrypting the files, don't merely delete the original, overwrite it and then delete it, so that the data is no longer anywhere at all in any unencrypted form. This makes it quite a lot more difficult to compromise my security. Unfortunately, the program I wrote needs debugging; I will wait to do that until after this paper is done.
I usually do my writing, if not in one sitting, in one day. This helps me to keep my thoughts together. This also happens because, once I get to doing it, I enjoy writing, however much I may dread it beforehand.
I am plot-challenged; I am much better at writing descriptive pieces, or papers which have some structure readily available. I tend to steal plots from books I have read recently, and write ugly, unconvincing stories which are bent to more closely resemble the plot I stole, rather than bending the plot to my ideas. An example of this is a piece I wrote for you in seventh grade, about a boy and a girl who both found magic books. This story was stolen from Diane Duane's book So You Want To Be A Wizard. The plot of my story was really, really ugly, from my point of view.
I often find it hard to be concise. It is hard for me to condense my writing into some reasonably small number of pages. The example above is also applicable in this area; if I had had enough time to really develop the plot, and give the story an ending, it wouldn't have been so lame. I feel like I could much better express my stories in a longer format, but I seldom have time to extend them.
After I write a paper, I generally print out a copy and have my mother) look it over, and spell check it, in that order. If the writing was done before midnight of the day before it was due, I like to leave it, come back later, and revise. A good example: I actually started doing this assignment the day it was assigned! If I remember, I will look it over once more tomorrow, and then print it out that evening for turning in the next day.
Along with writing, I make pictures with the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), chat on the Internet, and compose music. Chatting has really, really helped my writing. In a typical chat session lasting half an hour, I will create sentences which really express my feelings to others, and provoke their interest. I write quite a lot in chat, when I am engaged in conversation at all. If you would like to see some of my pictures or listen to some of my music, visit http://finbar.dyndns.org/