Why I Write

I don’t write, to put it frankly. The only writing I do is when I am required to, mostly for academic purposes. School essays, college applications, the like. That’s not to say I’m not good at writing or don’t enjoy it to some degree. In elementary and early intermediate school I wasn’t a fan of writing. It was so long and drawn out, having to, figure out how to answer the prompt, write an outline, then a rough draft, then wait for the teacher to edit your rough draft, then basically rewrite the thing (because we couldn’t use computers), then go through the rubric and make sure you hit all the points, THEN worry about if what you think could count as earning points wasn’t what the teacher would count, then just get fed up with the whole process and turn the thing in already because you’ve wasted 2 – 4 weeks in this stupid thing.

Then I’d get an A.

Somehow I was good at writing, even though I didn’t enjoy it much. My parents say it’s because I’m smart, but I always saw myself as average (not that I had a problem with that). I suppose all the reading that I enjoyed when I was young familiarized me with writing.

As I got older I started to enjoy writing a little more. It was the most enjoyable when we were assigned silly prompts, such as writing an essay to your parents to convince them to buy you your dream pet (a tiger, at the time) or write a speech to the class about why you should be elected as the class Hermes as opposed to the other people running for the spot (I won, thank you very much). These assignments let me be myself. I now realize that I enjoy writing a LOT more when I write, not exactly how I speak, but close to it. When I just put finger to touchscreen keyboard and just type out my train of thought as I think it. My dad, who is in public relations and is a very good writer, always has to shorten my sentences and insert paragraphs when he fixes my school essays (I ask him to review it, it’s not cheating even though as I type this I realize it sounds pretty bad. I’ve never been one to cheat, I swear. And he is not reviewing this so it’s fine). I have come to realize I insert a lot of commas into my sentences, and make compound-compound-compound sentences, but that’s just the way I think.

I’m not entirely sure if I’m even answering the prompt. I didn’t know what the heck I was supposed to say other than ”I write for school” when I started this and I thought I would have to really stretch it to make it even a one minute read, but here we are who knows how much later. I just started writing, and it came flowing out. I guess that’s why I’ve always gotten good grades on my papers: once I get going I just plow through. When I write like this, how I think, without any restrictions and without having to worry about if I hit a point on the rubric or not, I think my writing turns out better. It’s certainly more fun for me, even though Grammarly always finds ”multiple advanced issues”.

P.S. Yes, I know I sound like Orwell. I used his essay as a guide without even realizing it and basically told my writing life story. Again, I didn’t really know what to put past ”I write for school”.

P.P.S Thank you, Brock, for making this class so loose and freeform. I would’ve thought the idea of no grades was stupid, but I think I am the kind of person who needs to learn to trust his own skills and not worry about the grade so much. I think my writing is already starting to improve because of it.