The Importance Of My Personal Narrative

While I enjoy writing, I wouldn’t consider myself to be a great, or even good, writer, especially not when it comes to assigned writing. Often I find myself avoiding the assignment until a week before the due date and very little sleep the night before I have to turn my paper in. I never cease to be amazed when my teachers return the papers, which I consider to be incredibly mediocre and below my teachers expectations, with rather decent grades on them. However, I wouldn’t say that I am a bad writer either. When it comes to writing, my first challenge is always figuring out what I want to say and how to say it in a way that is understandable and meets the expectations of my reader.

While in class during an essay in high school, my head would start to hurt from the stress, I was always afraid I would write something that sounded like a 1st grader wrote it. I always thought to myself, the sooner this will be done the sooner I can relax. Finishing a 3-page essay in 20 minutes is almost unheard of, but not for me back then. I was a nervous wreck when it came to English just a few years ago. I had zero confidence.

When we started writing I learned that my main weakness was getting my point across while staying on topic. I have always struggled with writing, so when I took this class I knew I would have to improve on my writing. When we wrote our first essay in the class, I knew it was terrible. I was very nervous about turning in the paper because I knew that I could have done better but I was not sure how to get my point across and my paper still make sense. Luckily for me, Mrs. Garth was very tough but then again she was very lenient on us.

This semester I learned many new things in my English 1301 class. I took this class last year but I had to drop it because I didn’t have a professor explaining the work to me. And I really didn’t understand what I was doing. At first, I was scared to take this class. During my high school years I wasn’t that good of a writer.

However, the experience that I went through between the period of my high school and community college has totally changed my life. I used to living in Oakland and went school there. When I was a freshman in high school, I did not realize how important education is, plus the pressure that added on me from my parents and the environment that surrounds me, I did not wanted to be serious about school at all. My parents always wanted me to take my time to study and telling me the importance of education, but I believed that people can become successful without education. Therefore, under the ordering of my rebellious heart, I started skipping classes and became lazy about school.

Decisive Moment Having consistently received A’s and B’s in the past, I shocked myself when I failed both semesters of AP Calculus AB. That happened sophomore year and it struck me like a bolt of lightning. I had negative thoughts about my success in the future and it impacted me greatly. For awhile, I questioned and asked myself why I did not study hard like the other students. I also feared that I would not be able to get into the university I wanted.

I guess you could say no one in my family is really outstanding academically. Being bad at reading and writing, (but mostly reading) made me think that I was never going to be successful in my future life. Five years later flew by; in the 7th grade I got taken out of my English class everyday because of my IEP, and my helper teacher helped me with whatever I needed. She read and explaine... ... middle of paper ... ...to him one on one and all he had to say to me was good things. He said, “Evie, you have made a huge progress this year.

I feel as though this class has helped me become a more polished and professional writer. When I first entered English 110, I was extremely unsure and lacked confidence in my writing. I believe that this point can be partly attributed to the fact that I had always had my instructors holding my hand and helping me through the writing process in high school. My senior English teacher always reminded us that college would be much more challenging than her class was and then she would go on to tell us stories of professors who gave out zeros for tiny oversights within a paper. This combined with general apprehension about college life left me terrified.

There would be no more leaving quotes wandering, never introduced, or turning my paper into a commentary on someone else’s quotes. I learned to effectively use quotations and research, and still keep my Identity as a writer. This was a prodigious step, and one I will ever be purifying. “Write a Thesis driven paper,” this was by far... ... middle of paper ... ...t express the wealth of knowledge that I feel that I have learned from this class. There seems to be so much more to learn, so many places we never had the chance to go; so much so, that I have opted to take your class again next semester.

I already had my mind set that I was going to write what I thought the reader wanted to hear instead of what I truly wanted. I decided, however, that although the two questions of “Is it good?” and “Does this suck?” Barry presents would haunt me for the rest of my life, if my personal statement was not truly me, then I was getting into schools for the wrong reasons. It was surprising how, for so long, I struggled writing this life-altering essay and when I just let it go, and started writing without worrying about perfectionism, I “…was both there and not there… and the lines made a picture and the picture made a story” (124). I was able to write an essay that mattered to me as opposed to something that was a misguided version of myself. It took me a week to write the essay I used instead of the three months it