Quinton Richards Essays - Guggenheim Fellows, American Literature

Quinton Richards Professor Towe English 101 section 1 October 2017 How did I learn to write? well l earning how to write was not an easy task for me It has taken me a lot of practice to hone in and acquire this skill. I been through a lot of difficulties, s truggles and challenges to learn how to become an effective writer. I am going to state three reasons on how I became and effective writer in high school . W hat where my difficulties and challenges and how I overcame those difficulties and lastly why do I enjoy writing now compared to back in high school. As you are reading I hope you come to understand how I started writing effectively. To begin with I had difficulties in writing I was not a good writer I literally hated writing the only thing I enjoyed writing was lyrics to my songs that I wrote. In fact, if you had put an essay in front of me and told me to write three paragraphs on something I could not do it I just hated writing. The difficulties and struggles I would have was how to properly word and list things. I would always have run on sentences never knowing where to place a period or a semicolon, colon or a dash I did not know. The challenges I would face after I would give my essay into the teacher he or she would give constructive criticism and that would be the part where I would just feel like I never did a good job and to remind you I had low self-esteem in that time of my adolescence so I was always judging myself. I would always beat myself down and think low of my writing but looking back it was just the period placement and run on sentence and spell check that I had challenges and difficulties with. How I overcame these difficulties I just started practicing writing every day to hone my skill. I would look up new words and find out the meaning to them and incorporate it into my writing. Initially I was not I repeat I was not an effective writer no not at all but my first real writing experience happened my sophomore year at Irvington High School. It was the second to last day of school of my freshman year, I happened to be flipping through the course descriptions book with my guidance counselor , and was thinking of an English class to take next year. Well, I sat there and sat there looking through the pages and finally found one class that appealed to me. I thought, "WOW, this is a class I should take but I still decided to register for American History anyway. Well, the school year finally ended, and I wasn't too happy for next year's school year to begin. I mean, American History was going to be boring with all the reading not to mention all the writing too But I didn't consider the writing to be a big problem, because I had gotten to be pretty good at it by my freshman year or so I thought. On the first day of my American history class my teacher Mr. , Wilcox had us write a three page paper on democracy from home work and it was due in 5 days so it was due on Tuesday because school started on a Tuesday so I did the paper and the next day I turned it in and Mr. , Wilcox promised the class to give our papers back on Thursday of that week so Wednesday go by and its now Thursday, Mr. , Wilcox gives us all back our papers and I was so excited because I wanted to know what my grade was so when Mr. , Wilcox had come over to my desk and hand me paper I turned it over and it had the grade letter D on it I was shocked my face had dropped I was in denial I was dismayed like why and how did this happened. So, class had ended and I asked Mr. , Wilcox how did I get a D