First Essay Final Copy

How I Learned to Write

My love has always been math, reading and history, but never writing. Math has always been my favorite subject because it’s something that you can do your own way, know it’s right and not have to worry about someone else’s opinion about how you did it. There are only two answers in math your either right your wrong, there’s no middle ground. Writing is one of those subjects where one form can be right to one person but then be completely wrong to another. It’s not your opinion that matters in writing, even on your own essay it’s your teacher’s, your classmates’, or a complete stranger’s opinion that matters most, and this has never sat well with me. In middle school and high school as I was excelling above everyone else in math, my English teachers were handing me back essays with more red markings then there was black ink from my original paper. To go along with all these red markings, most people would expect an explanation on how to fix the paper and maybe some guidance on how not to make the same mistakes in the future. This was not an expectation any of my teachers ever fulfilled.

To me, the first four essays that were presented in our class were each an account of how my classmates’ love of reading and writing has grown throughout their lives and developed into a lasting love that is still with them today. As I read each one of the essays I realized that I could not fully relate to any of them. While I can perfectly relate to each of their love of reading, as they described how passionate they were about writing and how much they actually enjoyed it, it almost made me sick. “How could someone ever like writing that much?” I asked myself. The whole subject of writing has always left an unsavory taste in my mouth and I doubt that will change anytime soon.

When I was growing up we had a special time in my family, every day or every other day, where my siblings and I would sit on the floor around my mom and listen to her read. There was no better time in my childhood than the time I spent listening to my mom read. The way in which she read brought the story to life for me. She would use a distinct voice for every character in the story and the tone in which she would tell it only added to the excitement and mood already portrayed by the author.

The first book I can remember ever being read, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, is still one of favorite books to this day. In fact, just over Christmas break I read it three times in a row to my two nephews as they sat beside me and pleaded for me to read it again and again after I finished it every time. Their constant desire to be read to, even if it was a book they had just heard two or three times, reminded me of the love I once had as a child of being read to and how I had
always wanted more. Just one more chapter, just one more book.

The most distinct memories I have of being read to come from when I was five to nine years-old. I remember most sitting in my living room day after day, without fail, listening to my mom read each of the first three Harry Potter books as they came out. She would only read three or four chapters at a time and she always found the most suspenseful spots to cut off at. I remember staying up late many nights wondering what would happen to Harry Potter and his companions. This suspense killed me, but it also increased my love of that reading time. Because of these story times the love of reading was always there in my life and even today there is almost nothing better, to me, than sitting down with a good book and reading the day away. When I can find the time to start a good book these days, it is nearly impossible to get me to do anything else; I have to finish the book. The suspense filled nights my mom once put me through will
never happen to me again.

Unfortunately, this love of reading has never transformed into any kind of love for writing. Even from kindergarten there has always been a dread of writing in me. I think it all started from the constant criticism I received from my kindergarten teacher on my penmanship, which didn’t make me want to improve, it only made me want to write as little as possible. Similarly going through the years of English I grew accustomed to receiving the comments of “print more legibly”, “can’t read this” or “rewrite illegible” on my assignments. It wasn’t like I could just easily fix this problem by typing my assignments, as some of you might be thinking, because, believe it or not, most of my teachers up until 9th grade required handwritten papers.

I had it imprinted on my brain, due to the constant criticism of my writing, right from the beginning of my school career that I wasn’t a good writer and I never once questioned this. The simple explanation from my fifth grade teacher of, “Well you can’t be good at everything” made perfect sense to me, and I was good at everything else. By the time high school rolled around I no longer even attempted to get better at my writing, I just accepted that I wasn’t good. Even though I could, by then, type out my assignments, the amount of red ink I received on my writing papers never decreased. I can not ever remember receiving a paper back from a teacher and being told “good job” on it, until my freshman semester at Siena.

Upon being accepted to Siena my motivation was renewed and I was determined to excel in every aspect of my schooling. College is supposed to be a place filled with teachers who actually care about their students and want to help them progress. I can still hear the sound of my mom’s voice saying, “You better not screw this up Patrick Jay!” as she turned to leave on move in day. I was determined not to let her down in any aspect of my schooling, including writing.

With the acceptance of my inferior writing skills still stuck in back of my head, you can imagine how little I was surprised when I met with my Foundations teacher, in the beginning of my first semester, about my first paper. I watched him mark something wrong in literally every sentence of the essay I had submitted to him. “Here we go again!” I thought to myself, sitting there watching him destroy my essay; it was the start of high school all over again, I thought. The only difference this time was that my professor took the time to explain why he was marking these errors. He tried to help me to understand how to correct the mistakes I was making for future drafts and essays. The results of that ten minute sit down showed, in my next draft, that it was really all I had ever needed. The second draft of that same essay received an A and was the reason my professor recommended me to take this course. It was also the paper I used as an example of my writing to get accepted into the course.

Over my first semester, my writing skills continued to develop and grow with the help of my foundations teacher, Professor Harden. Without his help writing would surely still be my weakness and I would not be in this class today, but thanks to his guidance I’m now on my way to becoming a much stronger writer. I would now even consider it to be among my strengths academically and, who knows, maybe one day I’ll even enjoy writing.