Undergraduate / I am not meant to be a writer. (Common App Essay) [2]

Please read over my Common App essay and give feedback on it. Thanks!

Prompt: The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

being a writer isn't my destiny

Some people are lucky enough to discover what they are meant to be at an early age.

I was lucky enough to find out what I am not meant to be-a writer.

I first suspected that my writing abilities were substandard during the journal assignments we had to complete in the fourth grade. While my classmates easily filled up sheets of notebook paper with descriptions of their summers or weekends, I could barely (and sometimes didn't) meet the minimum length requirement. I always struggled to find the appropriate words to describe what I wanted to express. As I started middle school, this inability to communicate effectively and efficiently slowed me down to the point where I would get extremely anxious and stressed whenever I was assigned an essay because that meant several hours of work to finish what should have been a painless one- or two-page paper.

By the time I entered high school, my suspicions were sufficiently confirmed and I concluded that I was just naturally bad at writing. There were more variable factors involved in creating an essay than I could handle, and I was not naturally inclined to utilize sophisticated language to create vividly eloquent prose. This deficiency also led to a general dislike for English and an affinity for Math, where the writing assignments, if any, were factual rather than rhetorical.

However, I managed to hide this shortcoming fairly well until, during my junior year, two major experiences made me realize I couldn't continue faking it if I wanted to be successful. The first was the rejection of my North Carolina Governor's School application. I had spent weeks crafting the essays for this application, yet it clearly was not good enough. The second was the arrival of my ACT scores. Despite my best efforts and having otherwise great scores, my essay had received a score of 6 out of 12, which fell below even the 50th percentile. These two failures were not only frustrating and disappointing, but frightening. In a few months, I was going to take the SAT and the AP exams, all of which had at least one essay portion. I knew that it was absolutely necessary for me to strengthen my writing skills in order to do well on these tests.

Over ten years of writing, though, hadn't proven to be especially beneficial, so I looked for a different approach than simply practicing writing. Instead, I began reading. And reading. And reading. I read as many examples of others' work as I could find. Released SAT essays. AP essays from practice books. Effective essays. Poorly-written essays. Mediocre essays. While studying, I discovered that the same traits which helped me excel in algebra and chemistry, like finding patterns and approaching a problem logically, also helped me gain more insights into writing. I began to notice similarities in the essays' structure, content, and style. I started to see what gave the best essays the highest ratings and what the worse essays were lacking. Then, I took this information and used it to develop strategies to optimize my own writing process, which eventually evolved from barely creating an outline and just getting the words out to actually managing my time and creating with a goal in mind. When the month of May finally arrived, I felt far more confident in my abilities than when I first received my ACT scores.

All of the preparation I had done paid off with results I could be proud of. My SAT essay turned out much better ACT essay did, I passed my AP exams with fours and fives, and I came to understand that writing is not as scary or enigmatic as I once believed it to be.

I am not meant to be a writer, but that will not stop me from writing.