An Advanced Writer

Growing up as both an avid reader and GATE student I have always been an advanced writer. When I was ten years old my mom enrolled me in the local university’s GATE Summer School Program at the behest of my third grade teacher who was aware of my love for reading and believed that a good reader makes for a good writer. I attended Gate Summer School at Azusa Pacific University for four summer in a row, learning about music and culture, but most importantly how to become a good writer. I wrote research papers on Ancient Egypt, biographical pieces on Walt Disney and Salvador Dali, and creative writing papers about faraway places and heroes in disguise. It was here that I began to develop a real interest in reading and writing, not only as a student, but perhaps as an author or teacher. There was one problem with this though, as I got older I
I am able to create text that flows fairly well and am able to address the prompt in creative and interesting ways. However, I have always taken the easy route when it comes to writing by basically skipping the entire writing process and only writing a single draft for each paper, and turning it in. When I was an honors English student in high school I was able to get away with writing out a single draft the night before an assignment was due and turning it in, often without proofreading it first, because the writing expectations for freshmen and sophomores are not very high. When I became an AP English Language and Composition student I quickly learned that my writing method, or lack thereof, was not going to earn me easy A’s with my teachers, so I began to have my peers read over my drafts and check for errors. Suffice to say, there were many errors present in my writing. I tend to struggle with punctuation mistakes- I am still confused about the proper way to use colons, semicolons and dashes- and I am guilt of using quite a few run-on sentences on my