McKahl Johnson
Honors English 11
8/27/10
My Brilliant Writing Journey
In my day, I have encountered many different stories, poems, writing styles, techniques, even ways to hold a pencil, but it all boils down to one thing- where it all started.
To this day, I remember my pre-school classes. To teach us how to write, they would give us papers with random words or our names on it written in dotted line so we could trace over it. I guess that’s one good way to teach small children how to write, but for me it wasn’t a very useful method. My pre-school teacher wasn’t a positive influence for my writing practices. It wasn’t exactly her fault though. Being the wee, little tot I was way back then, you can only imagine how intimidating for me it was to follow rules and instructions from somebody that wasn’t one of my parents for the first time. I felt much better learning with my mom or dad at the comfort of my own kitchen table during dinner or my occasional after school snack.
After a couple years, my writing skills improved. In fact, I was such a well developed six year old, I even knew how to express my feelings on paper, for example, this is a direct quote from my first grade journal, “I like my mom and dad but I dont like my sister cas she’s sordof a brat.” I don’t think that sentence needs to be corrected at all for you to understand what it means. My first grade intellect was pretty impressive, but all great writers have those moments when something just doesn’t seem good enough. One day, I was practicing writing M’s when the teacher strolled past my desk and began to observe me. Right then, she took the paper from my hands and said an insult so rude, I could’ve gone my whole life without hearing it- “Your M’s look like curvy roller coasters.” It would be an understatement to say I was mad. Even worse, after verbally abusing me, she got me a new paper and made me start all over. But if constructive criticism is supposed to help people become better writers, maybe those harsh words were supposed to be a positive thing for me after all, right? At the time, I did not know that constructive criticism was going to lead me down a road of success.
Currently, I have pretty good strengths in writing. I’m almost always grammatically correct (yes, I am bragging about it) and I try to use big words in my papers to make them sound more intelligent. But hey, maybe everyone does that. I would have to say that my weaknesses in writing are far more significant than my strengths. Over the years, it has become harder and harder for me to express my thoughts and feelings on paper. Every now and then, I’ll become so driven to explain something that’s going on in my head that I’ll have to hurry and write about it. (Usually in poetry form or something along the lines of that.) Unfortunately at times, that creative spark will go away right when I’m in the middle of a poem. When that happens, I stop writing and never look at it again. In order for me to do creative writing, my heart and emotion all has to be a part of it. No great poet has ever just pulled a random thought out of their head and wrote it down without it tugging at their heart strings. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing poetry when I have a motivation to, but I just don’t think that I would be able to make a career out of it. Basically, creative writing isn’t my forte’.
I think that the most important thing for struggling writers to know is that if they want people to take them seriously in life, they need to know how to write for people to understand. This means no sloppy hand writing, grammatical errors, wrong spelling, misuse of certain words, etc. On the other hand, I could be a total hypocrite. Because this paper might have some of these listed errors. If it does, I’m going to look like a total idiot, but oh well. Making mistakes is part of the great journey of writing.
