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Essay On The Word Is A Book

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Letters and characters on the page jumbled, dancing into confusing black blobs of nothingness scrambled on the page. The mess of amorphous ink smothered my eyes, it filled my lungs, the confusion slowly silenced me. The pages of my first ever book still smelled like fresh ink but to me the smell might as well have been akin to the smell of death. I couldn’t say a word as if the fear itself had put a muzzle on me. My dad spoke up “That word is ‘the’”, I was even more confused. One hour earlier in the dark back corner of a Border’s Bookstore my dad and I wandered aimlessly looking for easy children’s books to help me learn to read. One of the workers eventually saw my skyscraper of a dad thumbing through children’s books. “Anything I can …show more content…

He pointed at the first word and told me to sound it out. Caught off guard I completely blanked. My heart raced, my tension increased and increased as I racked my brain trying to remember the right sounds that correlated to each letter. “The”, The first word was “The”, a word I have used hundreds of times a day since then. At the moment though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what to say. “Sound it out” his deep voice prodded. I thumbed the smooth pages, the black and white pictures seemed to be looking back at me laughing. “The cat is fat” my dad offered. I repeated what he said just to move on to the next page. One page in and I already wanted to give up. In the moment I decided I hated reading and that there’s no point in knowing how to read. Thankfully I didn’t stick to my convictions as my dad prodded me to read the next sentence. The first word looked familiar, “The…” I began slowly. My short pause grew and grew and eventually morphed into total silence. “The cat” I proclaimed proudly but then fell into silence again. Total confusion gave way to frustration as I got more and more upset. Relief finally came in the form of dinner. I stewed about the experience while half-heartedly chewing at a porkchop. My brief intermission was shortly over and after washing the dishes we sat down again to practice reading. Soon I started being able to remember words and was able to read a few

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