fear of writing???

This question assumes that we have a fear of writing, so I am trying to think of an experience in which I was actually afraid of writing. Well, I can think of one experience: when I took legal writing. I hated writing for the class because the instructor had nothing good to say about my writing and I wasn't allowed to discuss the projects with anyone else.

She was an attorney but she was no writing instructor. She was a graduate of one of the best law schools in the country but she did not know how to teach writing. I remember the first assignment was easy so I did fairly well. That fact probably made me overconfident; I forgot the old saying,"Never underestimate the competition." When I got the second essay back, all I could see was red. The blood bath, as they say. My paper was unreadable because it was covered with red lines, arrows and numbers.

After that, the fear set in. I realized I had one big project left to do, and that was legal analysis of some situation. If I did poorly I could fail the class, even though it was only a two credit class. I thought about getting help--which would be cheating--but I didn't. Besides no one appeared to know what they were doing. That turned out to be a false impression. Later, I heard from a reliable source that students had gotten help with their projects from attorneys in the area. So the students did not cheat with other students but had attorneys give them advice on how to write about the cases. So not only was I clueless about the project, I couldn't even figure out how to cheat like an attorney.

I was truly naive, and I dropped out of the legal writing program. In fact, when I started my master's degree in English, I still had this new fear of writing, something I did not have to deal with since the "You do not write coherent essays" statement from Professor Knapp in 1982. Well, that is another subject and I should have remembered Franklin's saying, "A country man with a lawyer is like a fish between two cats."