William Zinsser College Pressures Analysis

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In William Zinsser’s, “College Pressures,” he talks about one of the pressures plaguing college students is self-induced pressure. I was so determined to write essays of excellence that I made mental errors that brought my grade down. As I have progressed through school writing has been my Achilles heel. I was never fond of writing and always dreaded the idea of writing essays. I was never a strong writer because I did not fully understand the process of writing well-rounded papers. I always considered myself a subpar writer. I believed that I was capable of meeting expectations rather than exceeding. College and high school English are drastically different. High school English was less demanding, while College English requires lots of focus…show more content…
In the beginning, being able to write a paper that possessed the style and clarity to make the paper flow was troubling for me The required 1000 word essays were fairly new to me and seemed absurd, being as though every paper I wrote before college was less than 1000. At first, I did not pay attention to the mistakes I was making such as generalizations and wordiness. The wordiness also created awkward phrasing disrupting the flow of the sentence. I was more focused on writing to meet the 1000 word limit rather than focusing on the topic and sentence structure. While taking English 1101 I realized I was using several unnecessary words that made sentences sloppy and wordy. For example, in the second essay there is a sentence that states, “In terms of whether or not all athletes would get paid the same you said.” After noticing the wordiness the sentence was revised to, “In terms of whether all athletes would get paid the same you said.” Another problem that occurred was the use of the word “it”. In high school, whenever I wrote papers I used the word “it” a lot. I was unaware of how “it” affected my paper. By using the word “it” I indirectly referred to the subject of my sentence rather than directly using the exact subject to help the audience understand. For example in the fifth paragraph of my first original paper I said, “If it were up to me the Cotillion attire would have been something simple and casual, much more suitable in my opinion.” After the error was pointed out, the sentence was revised to, “If I was allowed to determine the attire for the Cotillion everyone would have been wearing something simple and casual like jeans or sweats, much more suitable options in my opinion” By removing “it” I was able to reconstruct the sentence and directly tell the reader what the focal point of the sentence was. During the revision process I was able to identify areas of my essay that
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    February 19, 2015 All Kinds of Pressure The most important thing in these days is college; anywhere you go the first question you get asked is about your education. Just the idea of that puts a lot of pressure on college students, to think it is the one thing that decide if an individual is going to succeed or fail in life. By that I mean getting rich or not ignoring the things they love to do. In the essay “College Pressures,” William Zinsser claims that the pressure on college students is under four main

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