Slamming the door behind me, I storm into my room and throw myself angrily onto my bed. Lifting the mattress, I shove my hand deep under and search for my journal. In one swift movement, my little leather journal is in hand and a pen in the other. Then, I begin to write. I write about how annoying it was for mom to “accidentally” throw away my essay paper because she thought it was clutter. I describe about how dumb it was for her to not even think to glance down and realize that it was a 50 point essay that I had spent hours hounding over. I write about how my dad’s lecture made my blood boil and how he didn’t even understand the struggles of a high school student. I ranted about the long list of things that I had to do for high school and college and I raved about how my parents weren’t even giving me any sympathy at all. After what seems like an hour or two, I realize that the anger is gone, the annoyance has disappeared, and the only remnant of my fury is 15 pages of scraggly, jagged sentences.

It had been a week before the deadline of my “Great Gatsby Analysis” Paper and I still hadn’t started. In fact, I didn’t even know where to begin. Gatsby didn’t involve me.. It didn’t even teach me anything. Why should I write about what the author really meant when I couldn’t see his connections to the world at all? These questions went through my mind as I began to type. After about an hour, I had written my 8 pages on the Great Gatsby. With a sigh of relief, I signed onto my document-sharing site and sent it off to my teacher. About a few weeks later, my teacher hands me back my paper and on it I find that she had written in red ink, “You need to go more deep”, “MORE depth”, and “condense your topic” all over the paper. With a sigh, I filed it into my folders of disconnecting essays and went to