Personal Essay: If I Am As A Writer

The art of writing is a complex and difficult process. Proper writing requires careful planning, revision, and proofreading. Throughout the past semester, the quality of my writing has evolved significantly. At first, I struggled with the separation of different types of paragraphs, and I found writing them laborious. Constant practice, however, has eliminated many of my original difficulties, and helped to inspire confidence in my skills. As a collegiate writer, my strength lies in my clear understanding of the fundamentals of writing, while my primary weakness is proofreading my own work.

My English Literature major has helped me to achieve an outstanding level of appreciation, enjoyment, and knowledge of both American and British Literature. As a high school AP English student, I struggled through great works like Hamlet and To the Lighthouse. My teacher’s daily lectures (there was no such thing as class discussion) taught me merely to interpret the works as critics had in the past. I did not enjoy the reading or writing process. As a freshman at Loras, I was enrolled in the Critical Writing: Poetry class. For the first time since grade school, my writing ability was praised and the sharing of my ideas was encouraged by an enthusiastic and nurturing professor. Despite the difficulty of poetry, I enjoyed reading it.

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

Thanks to Comp, my therapist refused to keep seeing me (Just kidding... she stopped seeing me in 9th grade). While that statement is a logical fallacy because correlation does not imply causation, Comp has helped me improve as a writer and as a person. In the one hundred thirty-three days that I have been a Comp student, my writing has improved quite a bit since junior year. Not only have I learned to write faster and better, I have grown as a student, reader, writer, and thinker. Thanks to Comp, while I do not see my therapist anymore, Comp is essentially my therapy.

Let's be honest, I'm not the best writer. I have had to write paper after paper for about 12 weeks. Writing isn’t my strong suit and I don't think it will ever be a strong suit of mine. During the 12 weeks of composition class, I have seen improvement in my writing. Many people don’t like writing but writing skills are needed in life. I'm a junior in high school and if I want to get scholarships for college, I'm going to need to write essays. Whether I become a plumber or a CEO I need writing skills.

Just as “Refuge: TallMountain and Kenny Find Their Meaning” helped me in my quest, as well did my special place paper entitled as “Not to Cry”. This paper contributed greatly to my journey as a writer. Through this paper I was able to focus on myself. I focused more on the creative side to get my point across. I was able to freely write about something I am very knowledgeable more than anyone else. Writing this paper reminded me of my family and writing about them contributes to who I am today. I felt the freedom to write what was in my heart without worrying about being judge by my readers. Before, I would always write something and worry about getting my grammar right rather than expressing how I truly feel. I was trained in high school to follow the rules of writing that caused me to not enjoy doing it so much. However, when I had the chance to attend this class I learned that my main purpose in writing is to explain my point of view of the subject. This paper reminded me of what I had learned from the past and I was able to better this personal paper that is a very significant material to my growth.

In high school, teachers handed out essays as if they were candy. Throughout my high school career, I wrote roughly fifty essays; none of which were of the quality I would want for my college writings. My Literature teachers throughout high school did not have high expectations or requirements for essays. This laid-back attitude led me to believe that writing was easy and that I was a successful writer. I believed that all you had to do was throw information together in MLA format and it would produce a quality essay, deserving of the highest grade. Of my fifty compositions, I only remember one in detail: my senior project essay, which involved the most effort of any writing project in high school. It was a massive task that amounted to

I don’t consider myself a very good writer. I write when I am made to or when I have something that I need to say that I can’t just tell someone. I keep a diary. Usually my diary is just a record of what I have done that day. It’s not so much about my feelings. I don’t really like talking about my feelings, usually because most of the time I am confused about what exactly I am feeling. I tend to keep the feelings that I do have to myself, to protect myself from getting hurt.

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

School, to me and among many peers of my age, is not a distant term. I have spent one-third of my life time sitting in classrooms, every week since I was seven years old. After spending this much time in school, many things and experiences that happened there have left their mark in my memory. Some are small incidences while some have had a great impact on me. However, regardless the degree of significance, things that happened all contributed to shape the person that I am now.

My experience with English has changed drastically from middle school to college. Being in middle school I have really had to do much of a big paper, but as I progressed through college I’ve realized there much more that has to be added. I had always wondered why middle school was so easy but as years went on, I realized that advancing to college there’s a lot more requirements and importance to writing. In middle school, I was young and just starting to really realize what an essay was and after high school I really understood what an essay consists of. No matter how

I had always considered myself a writer. I had always found comfort in identifying with the title of writer. I had the cliché I was born a writer stories to back up this self-given idealistic position. I was drawing full-length picture books at the age of three, before I even knew how to string together a coherent sentence in the written word. By five, I had no trouble whipping out a thrilling (maybe for a kindergartener) story that I begged my grandma to type up for me, considering I was not yet equipped with the skills that I needed to pen a novel by hand. Throughout, the rest of my schooling, I excelled in anything that required using the English language, particularly when it came to essays or reading comprehension assessments. It was these experiences that I used to internally quell the uneasy feelings that arose when people asked me what my hobbies were and I told them I’m a writer. I was uneasy, undoubtedly due to the fact that I had not actually written anything of actual significance outside of the classroom since I was very (very) young. Once I reached college, it became clear that how I defined myself as a writer would play a central part in shaping who I was.

There are three very important aspects that play a major rule in my life. They can be categorized as intellectual, social, and spiritual. My intellectual self is interesting because I am mainly right-brained which means that I tend to use my creativity more than my mathematical skills, also making me a visual learner. My social self consists of friends, family, and my surroundings. I spend most of my time at home with my family. Whenever I am with my friends, I observe their behaviors and listen to their opinions. I am more of an independent type of person. Being with different people has influenced me into appreciating different cultures and beliefs. I have learned things that have now been incorporated into my own set of beliefs and

When I first started college I did not know what to expect with an English class. I liked writing about topics that interested me, but high school did not allow me to do that. I took American History and we would have to write

English class seemed to be the most dreadful to take within school. Writing essays for most of my grade in a class is not what I was looking forward too. When I entered college I knew that it would be one of many challenging classes I would have to take. Starting from the lowest English class to moving on up, the writing assignments became longer and more thought out. The time came when I got into this class that I knew more work was going to have to be put into essays and thus brought out what I had not seen before in my work progress.