Personal Narrative: My Life As A Writer

Seventh grade was a drag to my education. I was mentally unstable and extremely introverted. My academics never faltered during this time, and I never had problems with authority. Learning was my first love. It was passion for education that prompted me to experiment outside of school.

Distant, cold, and non-existent describes my relationship with writing. My relationship with writing has never been a close relationship. Writing has always been difficult for me. I have never hated writing, but it has been a constant challenge for me. I will be discussing my fears of writing, the value of being able to express your ideas through writing, and what excites me about writing more and more.

During this spring semester, I have grown in many ways as a writer, and a student. I have started to realize, and accept the flaws that I have created in my writing. In the past, I never looked into my writings and saw my problems, and if I did, I did not accept that they were problems. In my writing pieces in the past, I was very hard-headed about what I thought was correct versus what was actually correct. I have also become More familiar with different formatting options on Microsoft Word to create a more professional piece or writing. However, figuring out all the parts of writing and making them work together is the most difficult part of writing.

In my first “Who I am as a Writer” paper I stated how one of the areas that I needed to improve was writing. I went into more depth talking about how my writing is not descriptive enough and how I cannot grab the reader's attention. Even though I still need to continue making improvements, I have gotten better in both of these aspects. Compared to my papers in high school my introduction paragraphs have improved.

The best writing I’ve ever produced is from last semester I wrote a paper for Sociology on how the movie “Selma” related to what we were learning in class. This is the best writing I’ve produced because I thought long and hard about what I was going to write and ended up making a 100 on the paper which I was very excited about. Another reason is that I’m not particularly exceptional at writing I struggle with what words to use and how to really make my writing mean something to the person reading it, and my teacher left me a comment saying how I had thought outside the box and done very well. When I’m writing, my only fear is that I could be using better words so that’s why after I write a paper I always like to continuously edit it until I’m satisfied. Challenges for me are thinking of what to write I guess you could say that I get writers block and I must take breaks and really think about what I want my paper to convey, but once I get an idea usually I’m and can come up with more ideas it’s just really that first few sentences in a paragraph that get me.

Al, Alde, de, shon, deshon, and Al’Deshon my name takes on many forms. Kind of like my writing in a sense. I have never been a strong writing also being the reason, I took this class first semester I think. If I get it out of the way maybe I’ll have an easier chance of reaching the finish line happening to be graduation.

This semester involved many writings that challenged my process in ways big and small. The variety of prompts each had their own details that required me to change perspectives as well as research topics to test my abilities as a writer. The topic that I felt helped me grow as a writer the most was the Personal Narrative. This essays caused me to think in its own way and only after completion was I able to effectively use the methods it taught me in my other assignments.

My writing journey has been pretty remarkable over the years. A lot of trial and error was utilized in discovering the writing style and techniques that would give me the most sense of accomplishment. I’ve been learning through the unit learning activities so far as College Composition II will be a bit more challenging due to the expectation of being able to write an effective academic piece from a formal perspective. There is always room for improvement which is why this semester I want to work on three aspects of my writing: sentence structure, grammar, and learning how to effectively grab my audience’s attention. Sentence structure and grammar have been difficult aspects for me to grasp in my writing due to the lack of frequency in writing academic papers.

First of all I would like to express my great heartfelt thanks for the time we had passed throughout the course and semester. It was interesting and nice because learning in funny way is among one of the best methodology teaching method to make students feel free rather than being annexed by professors.

Throughout my high school career, I have been exposed to many different elements of writing and, although some teachers have emphasized certain areas more than others, I feel I have come a long way as a writer. Despite this I also know I have much further to go. This fact became very clear to me as I was taking my previous course of English, Accelerated English Three. Within this course I was introduced to the MLA method of citation, I experienced disappointment due to receiving a lower grade than I had desired, and I discovered difficulties such as my impatient tendencies to look over errors and mistakes during the editing processes.

My growth as a writer was evident in my second peer review. In contrast to the first review, I offered comments concerning sentence structure, grammar, parallelism, APA style, and clarity as well (C. Twyman, personal communication, May 2015). It was obvious that my understanding of scholarly writing had improved. I was starting to see how the conventions of writing worked together to form a complete paper, however I was still unsure about my ability to analyze competent scholarly writing. Although my comments had increased in variety, I still found myself unsure about how to give appropriate directives. In communication with Cheryl, I wrote, “maybe reword this” (C. Twyman, personal communication, May 2015). This short but sweet comment

There I was sitting in the guest room of my aunts house. It was hot, the AC was busted, and I have not even started my history project. “I knew I should have started this sooner.” I said to myself. Ten minutes pass, and I'm still writing the first paragraph, when all of a sudden I hear a voice. “Take a little break man; you’re stressing yourself out.” I tried to ignore it, but the next thing I knew my left arm began to reach for my phone. I stopped myself. “I have to finish this project.” I said to myself, but I was not strong enough to stop myself a second time. As my phone sent a notification about a new video, my left arm sprang up and grabbed my phone. I wasn’t in control of myself. I couldn’t stop myself. It felt like the drive to

I have always loved writing ever since we started having writing prompts in elementary school. I was always so excited to give out a story. I would make these elaborate stories that evolved some fantasy aspects. The only thing that would mess me up in my writing process is that I would have a difficult time setting up the start of the story. The video talked about this, and advised me to get a journal or diary. This would help me write anyway I like without judgment. I am fairly new to the revision part of writing. I would always turn in my draft as is, but now that I think about I would love someone who can give me some advice on my drafts. I've never had a full writing process myself. This has lead to writer's block in the past drafts.

I think as a writer I am okay but not as good as I had hoped to be when I reached college. I do love history and history involves a lot of writing most of the time, but for some reason my writings in history and literature never seemed to transcend to English language or writing courses I have taken since coming to BU. I definitely think that one of my strong suits is getting my point across, however, my execution of my points sometimes is lacking a bit and the development of my ideas I tend to struggle with as well. I definitely feel like I need to work on grammar in my essays, especially run-on sentences. It always seems to be the one thing that I lose most points off. As this is a class based on how the topic of marijuana has progressed

Writing is not something in which one can become a virtuoso overnight. Becoming a skilled writer takes preparation, creativity, and patience. I as a writer have explored these skills through learning grammar, coming up with fictional and nonfictional stories in one class period, and writing long argumentative research papers.