Personal Narrative: My Relationship With Writing

My mind can never be quieted. I am constantly thinking of moments or ideas or fantasies. What is all this dreaming worth if I cannot share it with the world? That is why I have gone on a quest to find an outlet for my thoughts. It has not been a process that has been traversed with ease, but through this journey, I have found many pastimes that have helped form my thoughts and beliefs.

In high school I took an honors English course and the AP English and composition course, which were both run by teachers who were very able to teach me, as a student, very in depth ways of critically analyzing prompts and texts in order to write about them effectively and in an academic manner. They were very hard on students and although I resented them often during my time in their classes, I came out of each class very prepared for my first year of college, and to my surprise I was significantly more prepared than a lot of my peers. As I begin this course as a second semester sophomore, I have been able to recognize in my other courses that my writing and critical analysis needs to improve in order for me to continue to be successful

Everyday, we would do similar assignments and eventually became very repetitive and boring. It was because most teachers guided us through the process and hardly allowed us to critically think and develop ideas on our own. Therefore, I went through my middle and high school career learning to write essays without realizing how poorly-developed my essays had become. Apparently, most of my english teachers liked my writing style and praised my writing skills but I never found out why they did. I have always considered myself as a mediocre writer, but after taking this writing composition course, I feel as though I have greatly developed my writing skills and have become somewhat better than a mediocre

As my mother and I were driving on a horrendously windy day, I howled something that was incomprehensible. She stopped the vehicle in bewilderment and outrage, and immediately questioned me for the reasoning of this action. All I could do was stand and point in awe of what I was witnessing. She immediately discovered the bird too, just sitting in a long-dead cornfield. The ruckus startled the Bald Eagle, and began to fly away. My mother attempted to draw out her phone to take a picture of the beautiful bird, only to lose control of the device, dropping it on the vehicle’s floor. The marvelous bird flew directly above our vehicle, merely feet away, leaving me to this day striving to understand and appreciate all this country has provided me.

I seriously LOVE writing. I enjoy the thrill of creating a story and making it come to life. I don’t know why, but when I’m writing I feel safe, secure, and comfortable. It also helps me take my mind off of stressful situations. My best piece of writing is still in construction. I don’t like being assigned a writing topic like poetry or rhyme and reason. I mostly write about things I want to learn. I guess it helps if I look at it, then read it over again. I get seriously, off-the-chart UPSET if someone interrupts my free write. It’s like I turn into the hulk when I’m totally P.O.ed. Most of my phrases come from books that I read. If a character I read is being a salty person, I say what he/she says when I’m salty. When I wake up in the morning,

Writing to me is one of the best ways to challenge one’s creativity. The best kind of writing causes people to exercise their imaginations and causes them to think differently then they may have previously. I’m hoping that writer’s craft will further my love of writing and that this letter will give you a little preview of who I am.

It all comes back to when I picked up my first book as a child. I was always the kid that would sit in the corner and read while everyone was playing outside. I remember staring at the words typed on the pages on my books and wanting to be the one that wrote them. It came so naturally to me. As my love for reading grew, I started to be capable of writing. At that moment, it was just messy scribbles and circles on blank paper but to me, it was so much more.

Throughout this semester, I have seen myself grow as a writer in my discipline and about my discipline. This semester has been a great learning experience for me and Ms. Calow has taught me many techniques that I can use throughout my college career. At first it was difficult understanding how to write in and about my discipline. After while, I was able to effectively write and organize my papers the way professionals in my discipline do. During the course of the semester my grades have gradually improved, and I believe that is because of the peer reviews from my peers and the feedback that was given by my instructor. For my revisions, I chose to revise my Category 1: Project 1, and my Category 2: Project 3. These are the papers and projects where I recognized that too much was wrong within the writing. I also chose these projects because they are the projects I made the lowest grades on. Though the project grades

A laboratory mouse knows of nothing more than the walls of the labyrinth it is confined

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how lucky I am to be a writer. Ideas and phrases have always fluttered around my head and I had never really questioned it; a good friend of mine said something recently that made me. We were sat in a small booth at a local diner sipping on coffee as I casually explained the premise of a short story I had just written. She looked up from her cup, puzzled, and simply asked, “How did you come up with that?” I had no idea how to explain to her that sometimes things just come to me and then I write them down. It was in that moment I realized not everyone had the mind of a writer.

Through the journey of getting all A’s on my report cards, I had struggles with English and writing. I believe the reason I did not like writing or just English in general was because there was never a definitive answer. The answer was always comes back to the way that each individual interprets the reading. I do not believe that I had good English teachers until I became a senior in high school. Up until then, every time I would write it was like my opinion was always wrong. My teachers would not neccessarily always tell me that everything was wrong, but I would always see all the red marks and all the marks that were just for grammatical errors and think that my writing was completely wrong. I never really understood what they were trying to tell me or what I needed to improve on. I thought that the teachers were trying to tell me that my opinion was wrong and basically everything that I wrote down or typed was incorrect. Through all of that it made me say, “ I am not and will never be a good writer.” After all of those papers and all of the red marks I did not understand how I could improve. All that was going through my mind was that my

Writing is a continuous journey that begins in one’s elementary years and should hopefully gradually progress all the way up to college. While in elementary school, you learn the basics of composing literature, like stringing together sentences to make one short story, high school is when one’s writing skills should develop the most. Throughout my high school experience, my writing abilities have not gradually been attained. Over these, almost, four years, I have had a couple breaks in the increase of my writing skills. In ninth grade, I took an academic class, fearful of the fact that I would not be able to survive in an honors English class. That year was the longest break of my writing competence. In this class, the teacher gave us “our” rough draft essay. We would have to copy the essay by hand onto a paper, then type it, and she would grade us on the correctness of the paper, leading to everyone usually getting a one hundred. She said this is the way we would learn to write “proper” essays and we completed this cycle for every essay we “wrote.” I felt as though I lost a whole year to expand my writing ability, so the next year I took tenth grade English Honors. In tenth grade, I was genuinely pushed to do my best writing; although, it was intimidating because this teacher gave us less instructions, almost like a college professor would. I found this way that I really enjoy writing essays and writing about all the complicating ideas that came to mind when we were

A familiar yet annoying sound snaps me awake. My alarms going off, time to go through another day. I’ve got a math test in 7th period. That reminds me. The last day to send the email has come. Today is the day. All the work I have done will finally pay off. All I must do is send the email. That is all that is left, sending an email. An email is all that is left.

“Thank you.” The classroom is stiflingly quiet except for those two soft words. We clap as she returns to her seat, fumbling with her phone to stop the timer. A lull settles as we wait for the next victim. My hands are already trembling when I realize that I’m next on the chopping block.

My interest in writing started when I began writing articles for the Milken Roar, an online student-run publication. After a year as a Staff Writer, I became the Roar’s Spotlight Editor. As Spotlight Editor, I helped to create the “Humans of Milken” section, based off of the popular “Humans of New York” Facebook page. While the Milken Roar started as a newspaper, it eventually became a platform for opinion pieces and short stories. The summer going into 11th grade, I took a two week long Journalism class at Boston University. Senior year I enrolled in H Fiction & Poetry, an English class that focuses on student production of short stories and poems.