The Struggle That Changed My Writing

Young children are often taught that lying is one of the most wicked sins that an elementary-aged student could commit. Somewhere along the transition from kindergarten to adulthood, this fact is often forgotten, or at the very least, bent. Suddenly lying becomes a thing of habit, and why not? We live in a world founded on metaphorical cannibalism. In the mad dash to make the grade, to get ahead, why shouldn’t you “BS” a philosophy paper or tweak a resume so that you can bolster your image in the eyes of potential employers? “Why not?” I once thought when it came time to fabricate a middle school essay on a book that changed my life. After all, it’s only written on paper, not stone. What I’ve found through my experience in writing falsely,

The New Jersey honorable mention I received from Letters About Literature National Writing Contest should have been a crowning moment in my eighth-grade career. Instead, it is colored by well-deserved guilt over what I had done to receive that award. My English teacher had asked us to write to an author, deceased or living, about why their book changed our lives, which was the yearly prompt of the national competition. It’s a heavy question for a person of any age to answer, much less a 13-year-old. Not surprisingly, my mind was lost amid a sea of titles I’d read in years past, none of which, I thought, had impacted me in any way. But because my teacher not only planned to submit the letters but to grade them, finding a book that had changed my life was imperative. So I found one in my living room bookshelf. I chose A Miracle on 34th Street because, rather shallowly, I liked the way it’s cover looked. The red, peeling skin of the first edition copy appealed to some romantic part of me. The essay I made about the book was equally as

The point of education is to learn. Have you truly thought critically about the prompt and thus learned from it when writing that last essay you wrote simply for the grade? As Munger suggests in his advice to writers, the written word is powerful in its near permanence. Every piece you submit is a piece of you being preserved. Imagine if for some reason 100 years from now, your philosophy essay on a topic in which you never believed survived. That unfaithful representation of you would then be engrained in your future readers’ minds, with no one left alive to refute it. When you respect the written words, and indirectly then, yourself, there is nothing you can produce which you can regret producing. Some may argue that writing what you may not necessarily believe in is at times necessary in order to serve the writer’s best interests. It is entirely possible for an agenda to exist in which false writing aligns with the writer’s beliefs. I will not refute this, but I will say that every time a writer sits down and writes, she is faced with a personal choice. I now try to remain faithful to a way of life that encourages me to live up to my fullest potential, so that I can be proud of every piece that I produce. I choose not to lie to my readers and thus, never to lie to