My Struggle for a Thousand Words

I pulled out of my driveway behind a white pickup truck that was speeding and thought to myself how lucky I was to have not gotten behind someone driving slowly. Keeping up with the truck was easy, knowing I wouldn’t get a speeding ticket if the driver in front of me was going the same speed. As I drove around a curve, going a little too fast for this particular twist in the road, the right front tire of my jeep caught the gravel on the side of the road. The roads were slick from rain and applying the brakes caused me to hydroplane, then lose control and head into the ditch on the right side of the road. Scared to death, I jerked the wheel to get back onto the road, which I should’ve never done. Turning the steering wheel too hard,

Writing is one of the most important skills that I have learned throughout my years in school. I have learned that no matter how much I love or hate it, writing is a necessity; I might as well try to be good at it. Writing has been in my life for many years. There are many types of writing, educational writing and personal writing are two that I will mention in this essay. I have learned how to allow writing to help me in my daily life. When I began writing I hated it, however, I have learned the many uses of it, and it has become a huge part of my life.

From being so far from home and alone to fight for yourself in a world focused on themselves is quite daunting to say the least. When everything felt hopeless the words were always there to comfort me, when I felt as though I had no one to turn to, no one to trust with these words I knew the pages of paper never let me down. This semester is when I learned that academic writing can be just as emotional and personal as my journal. Something I try to ask myself every time I write is something Nancy Sommers says perfectly “How do I embrace these experiences, these texts of my life” and create something worth writing? I have learned that this question takes my writing to a new level and makes it interesting. Another thing I have learned is that writing academically doesn’t have to be a list of facts and statements to prove a point but it should include your side of the story as well. What I have learned is like a cook book there are so many forms of writing, like there are so many forms of the same dish, but it all has to include your own personal touch, what would a bowl of pasta be without a little bit of sprinkled cheese on the

I was in high school the first time I had to write a narrative. I was a freshman. This was Ms. Bradley’s first time teaching at Union Christian Academy. On her first day, she gave us our syllabus and said, “I do not accept late work, especially on writing assignments.” We, literally, sat there stunned. My freshman class had it very easy during eighth grade year. We were not expecting this. As I looked through the syllabus, I saw that our first assignment was due in a week and it was a narrative. At this time, I did not even know what a narrative was. Ms. Bradley explained that a narrative was an account or story of events. It could be either true or false. Our narrative had to be true. It had to be a true account of something that happened to us over the summer. She wanted to gauge how are writing skills were. Our narrative had to be at least two to two and a half pages long. I chose to write my first ever narrative on my trip to Fort Worth, Texas. Once again, I was plagued with writer’s block. I had the story in my head, but everything I

While attending writing class, I learned about the 4 steps in writing, bases for revising, organizing, and connecting specific information, and I also learned about the different types of essays such as descriptive, narrative, process, cause and effect and argumentative essay. I have been a student at Milwaukee Area Technical College for 1 semester, and over the course of my enrollment I have grown and learned more that I knew prior to attending this writing course. Participating in this writing class has taught me so much more than stuff about literature and language, it has taught me another way of expressing myself. I have learned here how to write and express myself, how to think for myself, and how to find the answers to the things that I don 't know. Most importantly I have learned how important technique, outlines and organization are. My goal in this paper is to inform writers about how my writing skills have improved.

When presented with the question, “who are you as a writer?”, I was speechless at first. But after thinking about it, I realized who I am as a writer has been influenced by so many different sponsors throughout my life and there was not a short, concrete answer. Brandt mentions that “literacy is sponsored by people, institutions, and circumstances that both make it possible for a person to become literate and shape the way the person actually acquires literacy.” (Brandt 43) My attitude towards writing has been influenced by teachers, both negatively and positively, by my mother, and by academic assignments over the years. My answer to the question can only be answered by a narrative of my writing life. I have convinced myself that I am a terrible writer, and when presented with a writing assignment, I get anxious instantly. I see writing as a burden and a huge obstacle that gets placed in my life. Academic writing is not fun, but something I value due to the fact that we are a grade driven society. When writing, I write to the guidelines in order to receive points for the requested criteria. The reason being, I gave up on expressing my own ideas because I had been shut down by so many teachers throughout my education. I tried to write down what came to my mind and put my own twist on things, but that was not the “right” way to write papers. In order to make both my teachers and my grades happy, I wrote what they wanted to hear, and even then I was not to the level they

My high school years were not spectacular, nor were they terribly productive.I left high school without learning how to proficiently write an essay. However, CUNY's Borough of Manhattan Community College afforded me a desperately needed second chance. It was at BMCC that I sharpened many of the skills I should have mastered in high school. I was able to greatly improve my writing ability. I began college as a student who found writing a 2 page paper to be a terrifyingly daunting task, but due to practice and numerous resources offered by CUNY, I soon was able to compose papers consisting of 10-14 pages with confidence and efficiency.

During my English courses throughout high school, I learned many things from writing simple journals, research papers, and a single term paper. During high school, I was laid back and procrastinated for much of my work. During the latter part of high school when I wrote my term paper my senior year, I found out that working a little every night writing a few paragraphs helped me out greatly. I was not just throwing something together just to get the grade and the paper finished. I spent time on the paper and

I 've always liked writing. Even before I knew how to write I would make up stories and pretend to write them down. Each year in high school I 've written a multitude of essays on varying topics. I have selected three of these writings from each of my years in high school to examine as part of this rhetorical analysis of my writing history. As I 've grown older, my writing style has changed and I 've learned more about the world and developed my own personal writing voice more and more.

Hello, my name is Yolanda Page. I graduated from high school in 1998. When I was a teenager I use to love to write in my journal, but, that ended over 20 years ago. Over the last 18 years, I have been a full-time stay at home mother of 8 amazing children. I love to take care of my family, which is a full-time job in its self that never ends. In 2012, I began attending Bethel University. I have encountered countless amounts of issues writing academically throughout my college career thus far. Maybe, I lack the understanding and confidence that it takes to be a good writer. Hopefully that will change someday.

One of the struggles I had was getting my first job at PlayLand during the summer. My shifts were 6 hours a day, 4 days a week. The fair looked like a very simple job and I felt confident to work. I never had any job experience prior to this and I assumed the work wasn't going to be difficult. It was great to be able to work and earn myself some money over the summer. My mom told me I could spend it however I’d like. A month after I signed up for PlayLand, I went to the interviews. It was very simple and everyone there was friendly.

My experiences in writing have been minimal. I have only learned the basics of writing, like putting together sentences, forming paragraphs with sentences, and things like that. Since I have been taking college English, I can tell my writing has improved a lot. In the future, I hope to be able to improve tremendously at writing essays, paragraphs, research papers, documents, and stories so that I have very little to no errors with drafting and final products. I predict I will be a well rounded writer when I graduate from college.

All throughout my years of schooling, I’ve had just about, one paper that was about one page long, due every year. My papers never had to be more than one page in length. Therefore, I did not have to do much writing or do many essays. Surely not enough to remember any of the assignments. Writing has never been something I enjoyed doing, so I never bothered to many any memories of my writing experiences. I did not think it was necessary to remember any of them since I only had to do them to get a grade. The only writing experience I remember was the first assignment I had in this English 100 class about a writing experience. All week long, I sat there thinking about what to write about, but nothing came to mind as a topic. Then, one thing came to mind, but it was so very vague, I could not write the length that was needed for the assignment. I could only think of a few sentences to write for it. After sitting for a few moments longer, I thought, how about I write about how difficult it was for me to write this essay before it was due.

Writing has always been something I dread. It’s weird because I love talking and telling stories, but the moment I have to write it all down on paper, I become frantic. It’s almost as if a horse race just begun in my mind, with hundreds of horses, or words, running through my mind, unable to place them in chronological order. Because I struggle to form satisfying sentence structure, it takes me hours, sometimes even days, to write one paper. It’s not that I think I’m a “bad writer,” I just get discouraged easily. Needless to say, I don’t think highly of my writing skills. When I was little I loved to both read and write. I read just about any book I could get my hands on, and my journal was my go to for my daily adventures. Although it’s

Then, something happened. It was near the end of my 11-hour shift on a Sunday. It was quite busy as it was a hot summer night. The line was almost to the outside of the door while there was only two of us working. A man and his son walked in. They stood there and stared at the menu for a while.