Diagnostic Essay
Originally published August 26, 2025
While sorting through my camcorder footage, I stumbled upon this PDF entitled “Diagnostic Essay.” I do not for the life of me remember what class or year this was for. I just know it was in college, but I found it interesting, to say the least, so I thought I would share!
I’ve never fancied myself as anything more than average. This may seem to be self-deprecating, or a sad attempt at being humble, but it’s true. I apply this form of (what I believe to be logical) thinking to most aspects of my life, including my education. I think as a student throughout middle and high school I was never going above-and-beyond; I simply did as I was told. I did my work as it came to me. This, however, doesn’t reflect in IEP reports and teacher’s comments. In the eyes of everyone else, I was a star. I was a talented dancer and exceptional student- a pleasure to have in class, if you will. I didn’t particularly see that, completely from an objective, birds-eye-view standpoint. There are not many things I believe I do at an above-average level. When there is something I think I’m good at, I hold on to it and never let go. It becomes captivating. Writing has been captivating me my entire life. Writing is what will aid me in becoming a better student.
Sparked as a child by all-consuming emotions I never learned how to process, screaming poetry into the pages of sparkly notebooks and fighting with different colored gel-ink swords was how I fought the mental battles against myself. I channeled my big feelings in a healthy manner, if you can call creating caricatures of real-life people then killing them off healthy. If there was any feeling bursting inside of me, it would inevitably end up written down somewhere on anything I could find that resembled paper. I like to think I was put on this earth to write. When I am writing, I am in my most natural state. And though putting pen to paper has always felt natural to me, the quality of the outcome has definitely developed drastically over time. I’ve never stopped writing, and I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to, and the constant trial-and-error process of writing and erasing, writing and deleting, writing and rewriting is how I’ve gotten good, and how I continue to get better. But in order to have been writing my whole life, I’ve had to be critiquing my writing my whole life, and I am my harshest critic.
Actually, I am one of my only critics. I’ve never had anyone critique a draft I’ve written for a class. As conceited as this may sound, I’ve only ever received praise. But on the opposite end, I was asked to review every piece of my friends’ work before it was submitted. I spent last year rewriting college admissions papers as ruthlessly as possible. I took apart essays and rebuilt them like a scientist examining her peers’ experiments and creations. This was another small piece of my process: critiquing others’ work. Seeing how their brains work differently than mine, reading how they pieces the words together in an order I wouldn’t have chosen. Helping my classmates out in this way helped me become a better writer in the sense that I got a first-hand look at how someone else would’ve written about a certain topic. Although critiquing someone’s work seems to help them more than it does you, I’ve never thought that to be true. It gives you a different perspective and shows you a different angle or style. Critiquing others’ work is just fun to me. Ultimately, criticism is what pushed me to be better.
However, I’ve learned that criticism is a funny thing. I know this because listening to feedback is how I learned to refine my writing skills over the years, but hearing is always difficult. It’s the negative look the critic gives, whoever it may be, that can very well tear me to pieces, whether it be the smallest notice of a grammatical error or a complete misunderstanding of the work. I work well with criticism, but it’s the receiving it I’ve always struggled with. I gotgood at writing simply by following the feedback of others and myself, listening to constructive thoughts on how I can make my written thoughts be better. I think that could very well be why I never thought of myself as a ‘great’ student. My teachers and classmates didn’t give me the criticism that fueled me to be better. In order to better my writing, I must first see what’s wrong with it. I’m not a gold-star-for-trying kind of learner. I admire the direction and the feedback and the suggestion. I admire it in most aspects of my being, not just my writing, and especially in school.
Much of this class pertains to writing, something I’ve expressed my infatuation with, and I’ve expressed my process of getting good at it (i.e., constructive feedback from myself and from others). In this class, the feedback I hope to receive from my classmates and my professor will aid me in the process of bettering my work. I’ve always believed writing to be something that can’t be taught in a classroom. I think you learn it on your own, but with the right guidance that can be given in a classroom, that is how you learn to be a good writer. That’s how I’m trying to learn. I learned to do it by continuing to until I got good. I learned to write by rewriting every phrase, sentence, and paragraph until it was as eloquent as I could make it. It is truly the simplest process for something so sacred to me. Yet it is a process I am working towards every day. I work to receive criticism in a positive light. I aim to be a better student in this class. I aim to indulge in my work, not just complete it. I aim to see myself as a star. I aim to go above-and-beyond, as I’ve been told I do so well. I don’t want writing to be the only thing I’m good at. I want to be a good student, in this class as well as in college.
With love, Willianny
