Lamott and Orwell response

The article by Anne Lamott was rather amusing. The painful experience of writer's block described by Anne is one that I can easily relate to. I can recall countless number of times I have put off writing the first few lines of an essay. I walked around with fear in my heart that I wouldn't make it through school and I'd spend the rest of my years as a hobo who sat on the corner of streets and cried. Lamott gives us a wonderful alternative to this cycle of misery: first shitty drafts. First shitty drafts are undoubtedly an essential in the writing process. It's near impossible to write a perfect essay off the top of our heads because our thought processing is much more complex than perfectly flowing and structured sentences. The thoughts that go through our minds are often choppy and skip from subject to subject. To write a perfect first draft would be to think in perfect grammar and sentence structure in our own heads. Yet somehow we still manage to pressure ourselves to be able to perform this impossible task of writing perfection on the first try.

George Orwell's essay seemed almost angrily written in my opinion. The random array of fully capitalized sentences describing horrible grammatical mistakes did not impress me. Rather it gave me the impression that he felt his arguments weren't strong enough on their own and that he had to put them all in capital letters to make them more powerful. Orwell's writing was by far much harder to read and not nearly as interesting and fun as Lamott's writing. Lamott gives off the impression that the reader is at the same level as her when she shares her personal stories. On the other hand, I get the impression from Orwell that he is better than the reader, knows more, and does not make any of the mistakes he discusses in the article because he's perfect like that.