heylookitsfia
Aug 15, 2016
Undergraduate / How I Wrote This Essay; I'm not sure that I've ever been a particularly good writer. Personal Essay [4]
Hello! This is my first post on here, so I hope I'm doing this more or less correctly :)
PROMPT: Describe a problem you've solved or a problem you'd like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, or an ethical dilemma-- anything that is of personal significance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.
WORD COUNT: 780/650 <-- Some help with cutting out/trimming the unnecessary parts would be greatly appreciated
I'm not sure that I've ever been a particularly good writer. I used to write, often, when I was younger. I was constantly reading, and constantly reading turned into constantly dreaming, and from there all it took was a pencil and a piece of paper and suddenly there were words streaming out with the force and grace of waterfalls cascading down the sides of cliffs. I shared them with the enthusiasm of my age, reciting poetry of my own creation and of others', hanging the stories I had got perfect scores on on the fridge. Writing was easy and it was always, in the margins of notebooks during class and when I was home alone and bored, and everything I turned in came back with smiling stickers and fractions equal to one.
My teachers said I was good at writing, and so for me, writing was easy, and fun, and I was proud of it. I started middle school.
I was introduced to five paragraph essays, ones where each paragraph was to be exactly five sentences long, and our outline worksheets were not the overlarge hamburger diagrams of my youth but something solid and simple: boxes, with bolded words at the top to make sure every student knew exactly what to write inside. It was fine. I wrote inside the boxes, and it was boring, and my five five-sentence paragraphs were turned in on double spaced and double sided paper, and they were fine. The fractions turned into percents, and sometimes there were even stickers, and I started to really enjoy math.
Sometimes we wrote stories, or poetry, and those were always our creative writing pieces. When we were told to write, it was analysis, with quotations and fill-in-the-blank style formatting, and we had our writing folders and our creative writing folders. Our writing folders were always thicker.
As you grow older, you start to dream less. Life fills with responsibilities and there is less time for pleasure. The constraints and guides you hated but relied on are taken away, and with more room for creation you find yourself stuck in a creation-less mind. I barely wrote poetry. I did not write stories. When we were assigned to write creatively, I struggled finding a way to do so. When we were assigned to write, I couldn't. I had been taken in from the wild and sheltered, growing so used to being fed by hand that when I was returned to my birthplace, I could no longer live there. Words did not flow, as I was given leave to write essays with unspecified numbers of paragraphs that were to be written in varied lengths, my brain sputtered and gave up. Essays could be written as I wrote stories: creativity was now a part of the dreaded essay, and with so much room to grow, I froze.
I could not write.
I could think, though, and there was plenty of that. Thoughts of failure, mostly, as what I wanted to say and share refused to leave my head, bouncing around with each pass making them grow in frantic energy. The faster they spun, the harder they were to grab, until the words I wrote had no connection to the things I thought, and with gestures of finality I would scratch them out, walking away until the impeding doom of deadlines gave me no choice but to walk right back.
The adults who once smiled and congratulated me now pulled me aside after class with worried frowns, offering help with a side of concern that left a sour taste in my mouth. I would smile, will the tears out of my eyes, and refuse. I was proud. I had once been the student who asked their teacher for extra writing prompts, and now that half the assignments I turned in were turned in late. I'm not sure how many meetings I skipped, and in turn how many informal detentions with frustrated English teachers and lunches with guidance counselors it took until I admitted I needed help.
Help was happily given and begrudgingly received. I was a belligerent student, and for every meeting of talk and discussion that resulted in essays turned in on time, there were several more in which I sat in silence and moped, mourning my loss of prideful independence as I now had to rely on others to compete the tasks I once did so easily, and yet with each finished product and each resulting grade (many of which significantly lower than what I was used to, but climbing higher, always, always just a little bit higher) came a joy and relief so much sweeter.
Hello! This is my first post on here, so I hope I'm doing this more or less correctly :)
PROMPT: Describe a problem you've solved or a problem you'd like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, or an ethical dilemma-- anything that is of personal significance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.
WORD COUNT: 780/650 <-- Some help with cutting out/trimming the unnecessary parts would be greatly appreciated
I'm not sure that I've ever been a particularly good writer. I used to write, often, when I was younger. I was constantly reading, and constantly reading turned into constantly dreaming, and from there all it took was a pencil and a piece of paper and suddenly there were words streaming out with the force and grace of waterfalls cascading down the sides of cliffs. I shared them with the enthusiasm of my age, reciting poetry of my own creation and of others', hanging the stories I had got perfect scores on on the fridge. Writing was easy and it was always, in the margins of notebooks during class and when I was home alone and bored, and everything I turned in came back with smiling stickers and fractions equal to one.
My teachers said I was good at writing, and so for me, writing was easy, and fun, and I was proud of it. I started middle school.
I was introduced to five paragraph essays, ones where each paragraph was to be exactly five sentences long, and our outline worksheets were not the overlarge hamburger diagrams of my youth but something solid and simple: boxes, with bolded words at the top to make sure every student knew exactly what to write inside. It was fine. I wrote inside the boxes, and it was boring, and my five five-sentence paragraphs were turned in on double spaced and double sided paper, and they were fine. The fractions turned into percents, and sometimes there were even stickers, and I started to really enjoy math.
Sometimes we wrote stories, or poetry, and those were always our creative writing pieces. When we were told to write, it was analysis, with quotations and fill-in-the-blank style formatting, and we had our writing folders and our creative writing folders. Our writing folders were always thicker.
As you grow older, you start to dream less. Life fills with responsibilities and there is less time for pleasure. The constraints and guides you hated but relied on are taken away, and with more room for creation you find yourself stuck in a creation-less mind. I barely wrote poetry. I did not write stories. When we were assigned to write creatively, I struggled finding a way to do so. When we were assigned to write, I couldn't. I had been taken in from the wild and sheltered, growing so used to being fed by hand that when I was returned to my birthplace, I could no longer live there. Words did not flow, as I was given leave to write essays with unspecified numbers of paragraphs that were to be written in varied lengths, my brain sputtered and gave up. Essays could be written as I wrote stories: creativity was now a part of the dreaded essay, and with so much room to grow, I froze.
I could not write.
I could think, though, and there was plenty of that. Thoughts of failure, mostly, as what I wanted to say and share refused to leave my head, bouncing around with each pass making them grow in frantic energy. The faster they spun, the harder they were to grab, until the words I wrote had no connection to the things I thought, and with gestures of finality I would scratch them out, walking away until the impeding doom of deadlines gave me no choice but to walk right back.
The adults who once smiled and congratulated me now pulled me aside after class with worried frowns, offering help with a side of concern that left a sour taste in my mouth. I would smile, will the tears out of my eyes, and refuse. I was proud. I had once been the student who asked their teacher for extra writing prompts, and now that half the assignments I turned in were turned in late. I'm not sure how many meetings I skipped, and in turn how many informal detentions with frustrated English teachers and lunches with guidance counselors it took until I admitted I needed help.
Help was happily given and begrudgingly received. I was a belligerent student, and for every meeting of talk and discussion that resulted in essays turned in on time, there were several more in which I sat in silence and moped, mourning my loss of prideful independence as I now had to rely on others to compete the tasks I once did so easily, and yet with each finished product and each resulting grade (many of which significantly lower than what I was used to, but climbing higher, always, always just a little bit higher) came a joy and relief so much sweeter.