For as long as I can remember writing was one of my least favorite subjects. I was always a bookworm, and prefered to live with my head stuck inside a book rather than writing one. Since I struggled a lot with spelling and organizing my thoughts. I became a slacker and stuck to the generic form of writing essays. The steps were easy and never failed me; ask a question to engage the reader then introduce the main idea and finally give evidence to support the main idea. This was enough to pull a two or three page essay the night before, and get a good score. Throughout my career as a student I wrote a fair share amount of empty essays. Essays without meaning to me whatsoever essays with very minimal time, and effort put into them. These essays got me through junior high and high school but were not enough to get me through my first semester of college. I had a sense of the value of writing, and what it represented to the reader as well as the author but it had little value to me.

It wasn’t until my professor assigned to read a story by Emily Vallowe titled “Write or Wrong Identity,” from The Norton Field Guide that it clicked in my head. The message that I interpreted from this story was “writing is a piece of yourself on paper,” it represents who you are in one way or another. This lingered in my head for days, all those essays I have written in the pass demonstrated that I am a mediocre person. Who settled for the bare minimum and I was determined to change that. I wanted to give the best of me on each essay but things are a lot harder in college and require more time. Time that I did not plan ahead for or allowed myself to use so the essays remain as they always were. However I did keep a lot of factors in mind and tried to put meaning into each of them.

The literacy narrative was the first and by far one of my favorite at first I was a little bit hesitant to talk about the topic I choose because it is very personal and dear to me. In a way I felt like I was exposing my biggest secrets and insecurities which were these so called monsters. That I created at a young age without knowing what they really were. But after receiving good comments from my classmates and professor I decided to continue the narrative about the monsters. I choose to talk about one of my biggest struggle when it come to writing which was spelling. Something that I struggled with for the longest and turned into a figure in order to cope with it. I decided to begin my narrative with intense imagery and details of what I was feeling at the moment this event took place.

I could hear the ticking from the clock tic toc over and over again with ever tic there was a drop of sweat running down my neck and with every toc my fear grew bigger. One minute had passed and then another my hand was holding the marker but I could not bring myself to open it. I heard the faint laughter of my classmates while the teacher told them to shush it up. I looked at Ms. Holmes and saw her mouth moving but I could not make sense of the words coming out of it. I could see the words on the board dancing along with the blanks I had to fill in. There it was at the back of the class staring at me and chanting the word  “stupid.” I ran out of the class room and made my way to the bathroom. Fighting to catch my breath and holding back the tears I crawled on top of the toilet. Unable to get the image out of my head I yelled “Stupid monster how much I hate you.”

I wanted the reader to feel or in a sense imagine what I was going through all while grabbing their attention. My purpose was to have them sympathize with me and think about a time they were embarrassed because of something. I added more dialogue and tried to connect my paragraphs as much as possible so they would make sense. I also tried explaining that the monster was connected to my writing struggle and once that was improved he disappeared. I was very comfortable with this form of writing and wrote the whole essay in one sitting I felt it had meaning to me and I liked that.  

The next essay was the exploratory essay which was a little more fun writing  because the topic was interesting. However it was a challenge for me because it involved most of my weaknesses as a writer. It had a high word count something that I was not used to and a specific format. This challenged me a lot and I was often confused on how to structure my paragraphs or what information to add. Along with that I had trouble with citing the information and incorporating the information without mistakenly plagiarizing. The second to final challenge for me was finding the two secondary sources I wasted a lot of time reading long stories or articles that at the end did not relate to my topic. This frustrated me a lot and caused me to ramble about The Superfluous Man characteristics a lot rather than explaining his methods on my first draft.

 This character possesses a great amount of qualities such as charm, handsomeness, and intellect. Even Though most of his decisions are questionable at times and make him seem foolish it is all part of his act. An act to protect his ego or social status and in most cases to conquer a challenge. Which in his case would be to win over a woman in order to prove another guy he is better or for his own satisfaction. His egoistic and narcissistic personality make him incapable of feeling sincere love or feelings for anyone other than himself. Since he is literally in love with himself regular methods of seduction do not suit him. So he come up with his own way and method of making the desired woman believe he is in love with her. In order to proceed with his plan.

I rambled a lot especially to meet the word count and ended up not going in depth with this character type because I did not now how to.

The last essay which was second most challenging essay I have written for this class was the researched critical analysis. I would even say it was the most challenging essay I have ever done in any class. It was my first time writing a literary analysis this long in general an essay with a high word count. Getting used to word counts and essays longer than three pages has been a major challenge for me this semester. Also procrastination was a challenge during this essay we had a lot of time to complete it but I would put it off so much it took me forever to finish. Even then I did not achieve my desired paper. Despite the challenges I loved how I began this essay and felt comfortable with the topic.

Famous poet Anne Bronte once said “But he that dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose,” a quote that applies to everything in life. Specifically in love because everyone one wants to experience that fairy tale love they grew up seeing on television and hearing about. But no one wants to experience the pain that comes when this love is no longer there. In fact this fairytale love does not exist and only a few are lucky enough to find something similar. Up onto the nineteenth century this fairytale love appeared in both real life and in literature. Where the characters would experience “love sickness” after a failed love. But then a new concept was introduced and the feeling known as love was strictly related to pain and pleasure. This concept is known as masochism and sadism but their meanings at the time were too much to bare. They soon were believed to be the cause of love affairs and other problems amongst married couples.

Likewise from the first essay I wanted to go more deep into the two concepts discussed but because of my poor time management this was impossible to do so.

Overall I feel like I learned many valuable skills from the class that I will carry on for the rest of my years at college. One of them being the importance of putting time and dedication into everything we do because at the end they represent who we are. Also the importance of drafting and peer review sometimes it’s important for others to read your work and give constructive feedback. As well as oneself reading our own work and figuring out what to improve. My essays are not where I would want them to be nor are my writing skills but I know with time they will improve.

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