Smells Like Teen Apathy

First question: Is it good? Second question: Do I care? I have always been a champion of the path of least resistance, call me lazy but I prefer to not do any frivolous work (we’ve all had enough busy work in high school to last lifetimes). Like most everything else, I always consider the opportunity costs of the time and effort required for revision, although this doesn’t mean that I will never revise my work. If I am submitting an important document, like a cover letter or writing sample, I will make certain that I run spell check multiple times and read over the piece at least three runs through to make sure the words come together smoothly. Strangely enough, for hyper-important documents like my personal statement for the Common Application I find that printing out the document increases the accuracy of my revision. For some reason, my eyes miss more errors when the writing is on a screen, maybe because of the eye strain that pixelated, colored displays tend to cause. Maybe that is also the reason for why I can almost never bring myself to re-read texts before I send them.

Nevertheless, the infrequent yet intensive revision that I engage in is not nearly enough, since for most pieces I write I only run a rudimentary spell-check and cursory skim of the text for glaring errors. The rationale I often create for myself is that, probability-wise, I most likely didn’t make enough errors to truly impede understanding or lose more than a few points. Given my status as a freshman at an institution of higher learning being forced to take certain general education classes, I don’t think that it’s very surprising that I am so aloof, but once I clear the lower level requirements for my core classes I believe that I will be able to better motivate myself.

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