Friday, October 22, 2010

Finished by Friday!

Each week I'm going to choose a project I've been meaning to finish, but haven't gotten to. Remember my finished projects posts? They were neglected during our move, so I'm reincarnating them under a new, catchier title :)

This week's project started when I looked at our bookcase full of mis-matched, unlabeled binders and couldn't take it anymore. I cleaned out the binders, throwing away anything I didn't want or need to keep anymore, then typed up spine labels for them (I found the easiest way to make them was to create a table in Word. I love tables!)

While I still don't love the binders out for the world to see and would rather have them tucked out of sight, at least now they look organized. Sorry, I forgot to take a before shot.
De-cluttering took some of my binders from 3-inches to 1-inch. Wahoo!
My favorite part of the project was looking through old things I'd saved. I had an English portfolio stuffed with papers and stories I'd written from Jr. High into college. I spent an entire day reading everything in it. Some papers were terrible, others weren't so bad. I found that I am great at descriptive writing, good at character sketches, mediocre at persuasive writing, and horrible at poetry.

Sadly, I find that I still haven't outgrown my over-use of filler words such as "really, like, very, so, just, got . . ." I'm going to start working on that. I also couldn't stay in the same tense for the life of me!

A few Jr. High gems included an original story called "The Care Bears Save Santa". (My teacher thought it should be made into a short holiday cartoon - and it probably could be). There was also a totally plagiarized story that my grandma actually wrote, and I just embellished. I'll have to repent of that now that I know better!

I am grateful that we had an English department that made the subject more fun. In high school I took English classes with the titles and subjects of "Ghosts in Literature", "Disney Movies", "History of Film", "The Bronte Sisters" and "Jane Austen". I had forgotten how much fun writing could be, and I hope to try my hand at it some more.

4 comments:

Mark and Shauna said...

It's always a good feeling when you go through and organize things (well, when it's all done). I love reading papers I wrote back in junior high, high school... so fun.

SydneyMin said...

Amazing project. If I ever get something like that done, it will truly be a superhuman effort and I would deserve the nobel peace prize for cleaning up my immediate environment :)

Katie Parent said...

Way to be productive! Isn't it fun looking over school stuff from many years ago to see how you have changed (and how you haven't)?

Sydney said...

Emily, you are way ahead of me! I have just been putting things into binders the last few months. Sorting thing OUT of them will be done sometime years from now :-) I have always been a "pile" person and I finally figured out that the piles could actually go into binders. So that is where I am. Love you!