My Unhealthy Obsession with A's

I've spent quite some time explaining to my mom that A+'s don't exist in college. When I was little, if I came home with a 97 on a test, my mom would ask me, "Where are the remaining 3 points?" If I came home with a 100, my mom would ask me, "Where's the extra credit?" Such was life - The subject matter was irrelevant and the only thing of consequence was the grade.

Growing up, I had a hard time in school. I was expected to excel in everything but I couldn't get my head out of books; in all other subjects but English and Social Studies, I was a mediocre student. If I could bring myself to care enough about doing well in a subject I didn't care about, I would excel in it but I was often unable to generate that much ambition. But in high school, I realized that I was, in fact, in love with the act of learning. Information and the act of thinking is what has and continues to sustain me as an individual. So I gave up the mechanical process of generating A's in subjects I couldn't care less about. I began to focus on things I actually liked doing such as writing. But still, the mechanical part of me remained; as long as I was getting A's, I felt as though I was writing well. An A- would leave me devastated. Though I was doing what I truly liked, I was restricting it and making it an unnatural thing. I had trained myself to follow the conventions of conventional writing. And I was rewarded for these conventional, hackneyed essays with A+'s which reinforced my misconception that I was writing great things. This combined with my fairly decent grades in everything else got me ranking amongst the top 25 of my graduating class. It hadn't been my goal, yet still, I found myself rejoicing.

Then I came to college and took a writing class, quite confident of my writing abilities, only to discover that an A+ paper in high school is a B/B- paper in college. This convinced me that high school had low standards making my writing low standard. So I emailed my writing professor an obnoxious number of times to figure out how to bring every paper up to an A. And when I did get an A, I thought I had finally learned how to write good papers.

In truth, I am only beginning to learn how to write now. I got an A in Writing 102, but aside from forming grammatically correct, complex sentences, my papers didn't say very much. A good paper is not testimony to the fact that the conventions of grammar are working, but rather a substantiated statement of the writer's opinion about something. In order to make the statement have any effect upon anyone, it has to be readable. It shouldn't leave the reader puzzled and irritated. I was brought to the epiphany this semester that needless words, rigid sentences, and the need to sound sophisticated creates a rather crappy paper. What good is something that is well written, if it only makes the reader miserable in the act of reading it? So, I've been brought to the realization that I have a bad case of perfectionism which is making my papers boring.

It's hard not to be grade-oriented in college. I can be totally idealistic and say, "No, learning alone is the purpose of college" but in truth, no grad school/med school will want to accept someone whose grades suck. A's will always be most desirable and satisfying but at the same time, I've found that when I write loosely, without the A obsession, I most importantly end up conveying why I care about the topic. Writing loosely also allows me to omit half of the needless words which would otherwise serve as space-fillers and attempts to sound sophisticated. This is the most important lesson I've learned about writing: no matter how profound the subject matter, boring, repetitive writing will reduce it to crap. In that sense, Odysseus in America was not a completely pointless read/skim. It is a fine example of a book that misconstrues length as a means of substantiating its thesis. In the future, I may find myself referring to this book as an example of the type of writing I should not be doing; as Professor Ramachandran said in class today, "Don't write like Shay in your paper."