In “Proficiency”, Shannon Nichols shares with her readers a personal experience of her as a 9th grade student taking a high school test that is mandatory for High School graduation in the state of Ohio and the outcomes of this event.
- How does the author feel about her writing abilities?
Nichols starts off her narrative sharing what a self-confident student she is. She says, “I was a strong student, always on the honor roll” and “I never had a GPA below 3.0”. When she gives these examples, Nichols tells the readers, with examples, the hard-working student she was. However, when she chooses to end her first paragraph with “I was smart and I knew it. That is, until I got the results of the proficiency test” she is anticipating to the reader that the outcomes of this test were possibly not what she was expecting.
This moment when Shannon Nichols questions her intelligence and her abilities as a writer, the negative response from the test shatters her confidence and self-esteem. She believed she was a good writer without any doubts, she had people reinforcing that belief in her as one can read when she says “even my friends and classmates were confused” in the text. However, having a negative Writing result in the High School test multiple times changed her passion and excitement forever. After eventually passing the test, Nichols explains that she never felt the same about it: “I began to hate writing, and I started to doubt myself, I doubt my ability and the ideas I wrote about”.
- 2. How does the author feel about standardized tests?
Nichols never uses the word “frustration” to describe her feelings in her narrative, however, the reader can sense this feeling underlining the lines and paragraphs of the story. When the author writes “how could I have failed?”, questioning herself and not giving room for mistakes or improvement, Shannon Nichols, perhaps due to her early age – when she took this test she was still a teenager, she does not seem to understand that people will make mistakes in things they are good at too and that the results of this test do not put in test the quality of her writing or how capable of a writer she can be. When the author says, “the people grading the tests didn’t have the slightest clue about what constituted good writing”, the reader can understand her anger and resentment towards the test and possibly that resonating against herself as well. Because this test did not give her any feedback on what she was doing wrong or what could have been improved, she never got to know what could have been done better and at some point, she stopped taking the tests seriously; she says “I wish I knew why I failed that test” – and her writing journey was never the same after that.
- 3. If you were Mrs. Brown, the author’s English teacher, what would you say when the author asked: “How can I get A’s in all my English classes but fail the writing part of the proficiency test twice?
As her teacher, I would probably advice Nichols that whenever one is writing an essay or any type of text, the author must keep in mind that what they are writing is not for them, but for the reader. The author has to constantly reread what they are writing to make sure any other person can understand what the author is saying without further context, solemnly with the information the writing is providing on those paragraphs. Sometimes when one gets excited with their writing, they forget to understand other people will not get the same excitement right away if the author does not instigate them with words.
Perhaps during Nichols test, the stress caused by the pressure of failing on it again was stopping her to pay attention to the little details that will take points away from her final grade. Shannon Nichols had to be reminded that does not matter how good one is at something, because there is always room for improvement and very skilled people in many different areas will make mistakes – and what really matters is how one will react to that mistake: will it stop them from doing what one is passionate about or will this motivate them to keep pushing and not giving up?
- 6. How do you feel about your driving abilities?
- 5. Has there been a time in your life when you doubted your abilities as a writer or in general? Explain.
Answered together:
I have always had diaries and journals and writing has always been to me a great tool to express myself and to be more transparent with my thoughts and ideas whenever my thinking and my words are under a certain speed that becomes too hard even for me to understand myself. Throughout my bachelor’s I had professors complimenting my writings and it made me feel confident that I was a good writer. However, I feel a little less confident when I have to write essays in English as it is my second language and I am yet to perfect it. I believe that reading helps a lot to improve anyone’s writing and reading is something that I already do. I like to think that the more I practice and challenge myself to do better, eventually, I will be more confident with my writing in a second language. Right now, starting a degree that is not in my home language, makes me doubt my abilities: fear of grammar, believing I am not expressing myself the way I would like to be understood, building paragraphs that will make sense to my professors and classmates: all of this together causes me a little panic, but, not enough to scare me away nor to make me want to give up!
One thought on “Janaina Macagnan de Souza – Conversation 1”
I love your insight on question 2!
I like how you read between the lines rather than look at the broader picture – you talk about the underlying emotions rather than surface level.Instead of blatantly saying “frustration,” you’ve highlighted how the absence of the word can still be felt in the story. I also like how you consider age as a factor, suggesting that Shannon’s age and lack of experience might have influenced her reaction to her test score, adding more depth to the understanding of her narrative.