This year my Myers-Briggs personality test told me that I am a “slightly expressed introvert, slightly expressed intuitive personality, slightly expressed thinking personality, and a slightly expressed judging personality.” In comparison to a year and a half ago, I am no longer barely an introvert but instead barely an extrovert, a little less intuitive than I was, still a slightly expressed thinking personality, and more judgmental than I used to be. Except for being more extroverted, these changes mean pretty much nothing to me, except perhaps that this test does not understand me at all.
The analyses provided by real people were slightly more revealing. Dr. Keirsey kept hammering the point that my “organizational and coordinating skills tend to be highly developed,” and also stated that my, “ability to organize, however, may be more highly developed than my ability to analyze.” In terms of writing, this would seem to communicate that I need to focus more on gleaning actual insights from literature, not on improving my compositional and organizational skills. This is contrary to how I’ve been feeling about my writing. Recently, I’ve been having trouble writing, but I’ve felt that the problem stemmed not from a lack of ideas or understanding, but instead from a lack of ability to compose and organize a paper which clearly communicates my ideas. These difficulties with composition and organization could be a result of a recent lack practice, and perhaps with a little time those skills will return and I will need to focus more on analysis, not composition and organization. I am interested to see how this progresses over the semester.
The analysis quoted someone else of my personality type who said that, “I make these little plans that really don't have any importance to anyone else, and then feel compelled to carry them out.” I feel that I definitely do this same thing. For example, a year ago I wrote about how I wanted to write only during the daytime. This was just a little plan that I dreamed up one afternoon writing a journal for this class, but it is one that I have since stuck to uncompromisingly. I’ve now basically convinced myself that I’m incapable of writing after the sun is down. Regardless of any basis in fact, this plan has prevented procrastination and improved my writing.
So even though being called a “slightly expressed introvert, slightly expressed intuitive personality, slightly expressed thinking personality, and a slightly expressed judging personality” means nothing to me, it is possible that this test yielded some insight into me as a writer. I won’t know for sure until the end of the semester when I analyze my organizational skills in comparison to my analytical successes.