Reflective Essay: How I Put Myself As A Writer

When one masters a certain practice, one becomes confident and nearly perfects the practice either because one had guidance or practiced continuously. I have not put myself in either one of those situations. To be honest, I write ‘put myself’ because I believe I had the choice of removing myself from classrooms to another better one; and the choice of being able to discipline myself to practice writing continuously.

Although I must say, I have encountered exceptional teachers in which introduced me to wonderful books and connected in powerful conversations with, but my writing slacks immensely. Thus as a writer, I concluded that I cannot call myself a writer. I accepted that I hold very little skill and experience in writing, therefore I
am terrified of my soon-to-be English college class. Despite that I accepted my poor writing skills, I also accepted an admission at a 4 year university, therefore I need to strengthen my writing before I get “booted out”.

Fittingly, to be able to study and train my writing skills on self study, I believe that the guidance would have made me a better writer.
Personally, I believe that I need guidance in the basics of writing: organizing, grammar, editing, etc. In high school, I met a variety of English teachers. My ninth grade English teacher was mostly a supervisor because she would first hand out magazines then make us summarize what we read. I can understand why she was not interested in attempting to teach the class, one reason was because she was getting ready to retire that semester. The second reason why she had no interest was due to the classroom environment which was chaos. My tenth grade English class was pathetic. The instructor was a man who only sat in his chair and used Facebook everyday to chat with his at-home “child”, who then I found that his “child” was an eighteen year old girl who obsessed over vampires. This instructor also accepted cultural foods as bribery to raise your grade. This was pathetic because all you had to do was attend to pass the class! Now these people with degrees probably once felt a passion for teaching and expected to teach excelling students and this was not the case for either of my past
teachers.

There was a shift in my junior English class because the teacher tried his best to engage the class in literature and historical texts. I firmly believe that he succeeded because I found interest in reading, not necessarily in writing as much because he assigned writing assignments 4 times that entire year. I read the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and also analyzed the historical speech, “Give me liberty, or give me death” by politician Patrick Henry, “The Gettysburg Address” by former President Abraham Lincoln, President Kennedy’s Inaugural speech, “I Have a Dream” by Dr. King, etc. Surprisingly I learned a depth of things, but even then I did not acquire much experience in writing. In my “AP English Literature” senior class, I read a number of books in and outside of the classroom, wrote numerous essays and developed endless questions as I began to form my own criteria. I blindly wrote essays for my “AP English Literature” class, because I never put any real thought into the essays or any effort; 1. I received two word comments as feedback “good job” “ok essay” 2. The teacher did not grade the essays herself! These experiences lacked in offering confidence in any shape or form for me to appreciate writing.

Since I lack skills in organizing and preparing essays, majority of the time I am terrified of writing essays. I think I am an average narrative writer because the writing’s focus is my description of my experience. I wish to strengthen my opinion and different techniques on rebuttals, or even ways on how to write a college research paper. To be exact and simple I am not where I would like to be as a writer and am in hopes of bettering my written work.