My Autobiography as a Writer

I do not consider myself a good writer; however, I have gotten better over the years. I have found that the more I read, the more I want to be a better writer and improve my vocabulary and sentence structure creativity. I was always interested in writing since I was young before I could even read or understand what it meant to write letters on a page. Now I do not have time to write freely as much as I used to but look forward to the day when I can.

As a child, I kept a diary. I used to write down the experiences that had the biggest impact on my emotions or that made me feel better about myself. I would reflect what happened in the events and how it made me feel. Unfortunately, though, most of my journal entries were about the boys I had a crush on and how we interacted. As I got older, my journal entries were a little farther between the dates and consisted of new theories about myself and my resolutions to improve who I was.

I started writing poetry in junior high. This was the year when writing was my way of expressing my inner turmoil of my life at home and who I wanted to be at school. Many of my poems were expressing how I wanted more freedom and felt trapped by all of the rules my stepmother imposed. At the same time, I read a lot of Emily Dickenson and felt that my poems had a dark side of loneliness like much of her poetry. I did not want to be like everybody else and felt frustrations when the society did not support who I wanted to be. I still catch myself writing poems that reflect my frustrations with society.

There have been a few teachers in my life that have truly helped me become a better writer. The first teacher that encouraged me to just write my thoughts so I can have them on paper to turn back to was my seventh grade English teacher. She encouraged us to free write in a journal in class for five minutes every once in a while. She gave us topics to free write about and encouraged us to write “I don’t know what to write”, as many times as we needed to until we found something to say within those five minutes. I loved it. Now I catch myself free-writing for almost every paper I write. There was not a specific teacher in high school that helped with my writing but that is when I started to gain confidence in my academic writing versus creative writing. Ninth grade was the year I remember mastering the five part essay. My essays were used as examples on the over-head projector for other students to follow. I felt confident when I heard the teacher mentioning everything I did correctly to show the students how an essay was supposed to look. It wasn’t until I got to college when I found out that my organization and grammar needed some work. In my first college English course, my papers were given back to me with tons of red ink corrections. In fact, one of my papers was on the over-head projector as an example of something not to do. All of a sudden, I lost all confidence in my academic writing. I could not figure out how I could go from being a good example to a bad example. A couple semesters later, an education teacher took some time to go through a paper with me and help me figure out what I was doing wrong. She helped me realize I needed to work on organizing my thoughts better. At first, I did not want to take her advice because I was upset that she felt she needed to tell me how to write a better paper. Then I realized that I would feel better about my writing if I made a few changes in my approach and organized my thoughts differently. I still find that I have so much to say floating around in my head and can’t seem to type fast enough o say it all. I think that is why I free write before I attempt any academic writing now.