"College Writing"

In high school, it has been engrained in my mind to write in a certain structure: intro, evidence, commentary, evidence, commentary, conclusion. Since I've started college, however, I realized that there is more than one way of writing. In my ESEM class last semester, I found it quite liberating to write as I felt; to present my ideas in such a way that made sense to me, not to the instructor, not to the other students, and especially not to the oh so standardized curriculum. Most importantly, I found it refreshing that I do not have to submit my writings to turnitin.com, a website that supposedly prevents any type of plagiarism; it even considers copying your own ideas from a past paper plagiarism.  Academic writing, as I've found this past semester, is not limited to a certain structure; its credibility does not solely depend on the number of sources one quotes from. But rather, it is a genre of writing whose boundaries and borders can conform to whatever you need it to be.