Writing
that moves you
“Those
things for which most money is demanded are never the things which the student
wants…the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the
most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”—‘Walden’ by Henry
David Thoreau
This is a
shortened passage from one of my favorite books and favorite authors. What I
love about this book as a whole is Thoreau’s insight on the real things that
life throws at you, thoughts and view points on life that seem to never phase people or ever come to mind. The words of Thoreau in his book ‘Walden’ still have relevance
and importance today, over 100 years since this book was written. If you are not familiar with the back story of
‘Walden’ then I will tell you of that story to set up better understanding of
where Henry David Thoreau was coming from in this passage and his book as a
whole. "Walden" was set up as an experiment by Henry David Thoreau. Before he
wrote this novel, Thoreau had built his own Cabin in the woods by Walden pond (hence
the name) in his home state of Massachusetts. The purpose of this was to break
away from society and the material world, to deal with the true nature of what
being a human in this world means. As far as this passage in particular is
concerned, I found it to be one piece of writing in a book fool of prolific
writing and insight. If you read this piece of writing and are familiar with
Mark Twain, one can see a similarity with Twain’s quote that read “Don’t let
school get in the way of your education” to this passage by Thoreau. This piece of writing moves me because the
words ring true to me through experience. This is not to say school is bad and can’t teach
you anything, it is simply saying that one can learn just as much if not more
outside of the classroom than in the classroom. Likewise, just as some say that learning by doing is the best way of going about learning and gaining knowledge. I thought this was a perfect
passage for me to select due to being a college student and having the
experience to suggest to myself that Thoreau’s words are indeed true. When I
started college two years ago, I struggled with the school work, but it was not
a total loss due to the way I became more socially proactive. When I wasn’t in
class I enjoyed meeting new people, infact a large number of people I met were not students themselves. Through meeting new people I ran into a lot of viewpoints and
philosophies on life that blew my mind at first because I never heard people
discuss these kind of things with me before. The people I speak of were mostly
all fairly intelligent, which were the most “cultivated of my
contemporaries” and have all influenced me until this day. I have made it a
point in my life to continue to reach out to people that are smart and
interesting, even if a bit different, because one can truly learn a lot about
life and himself by socializing with intellectual and unbiased people. So based
off of my experiences over the past two years, I will say that these words by
Thoreau are true,atleast to me, because I experienced these words at first hand.
Reflection
The small stakes assignment that I decided to revise was the writing that moves you assignment. The reason I chose to revise this assignment was because I felt it was my best small stakes assignment that I wrote this year. Not much went into the revision of the paper, because I feel it was already a solid piece of writing. The main revisions that I made were simple grammatical errors and I changed the wording and structure of certain sentences inorder to give the paper an overall better flow. This piece of writing felt like the first step of me improving as a writer. Since this assignment was one of the first if not the first small stakes, I think this piece of writing presented to me that I had already started improving my writing skill. I also chose this assignment in particular because it seemed to carry the improvment of my writing onto the other written assignment, including the 2 major papers we did over this semester.
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