Being the first article I’m writing for Her Campus, let’s talk about the topic of writing. This is a personal essay about how I relate to writing and my relationship with writing. I personally really enjoy writing. But only about things that I care about or that are interesting to me. I’m not keen on having to write about boring topics. The genre I personally dislike having to write is poetry. It’s definitely not my forte for writing nor reading. Too confusing. I prefer genres that are straight forward yet allow for creative freedom like opinion writing or argumentative writing. I appreciate opinion and argumentative writing because it allows me the opportunity to express myself and what I believe in. My favorite thing about writing is being able to use my words to express myself and address important topics.
When I’m assigned a paper, I usually start thinking about what I want to write about immediately. Later on, I’ll go and take the ideas or points I want to touch upon in my piece and just jot them all down onto paper. I prefer writing on paper rather than typing up my words when I start a piece. I’m fond of the ability to see and feel my hand using the writing utensil against paper, pumping out the words that are in my mind. It’s like having my thoughts be poured out into a visual that I can observe and go back to at any point. From there, I like to think about possible ways to start my paper and organize my ideas in a way that will flow coherently and cohesively. Once my ideas have a sequential order, I’ll type it all up and add anything new that comes to mind as I’m writing.
During this writing process, I tend to get into a flow where I’ll just continue to write until I feel like I can stop. Sometimes I end up writing more than necessary or jotting down ideas that don’t make much sense, but I continue to write until I feel like I can stop. I’m a fan of getting everything out onto the page. After I’ve written everything down, I proofread my writing, clean it up, replace words, fix grammar, cut things out, reorganize my thoughts, and make it sound clear and scholarly. Once I feel like my writing has a nice order, I brainstorm my conclusion. I love a good full circle moment, so I usually try to create an ending that can tie back to my opening.
One of my earliest memories of writing is when I had to hand write a paper for my third grade teacher. I remember writing really tiny because we could only write one page and I had so much to say. My teacher got upset with me because she said my handwriting was too small to read and that I needed to stop writing so microscopic. This made me feel limited with my writing and as a result, I never really felt connected with writing as a child. I’ve always felt that writing came easy to me but I enjoyed math much more because it was fun for me to learn equations and problem solve with numbers. Once I got into my junior year of high school, that started to change when I took AP English Language. In this class we learned how to write different types of essays and it sparked my interest in writing. I really enjoyed learning different writing styles because it expanded my ideas, vocabulary, and knowledge on how to make my writing stronger. I did exceptionally well in the class getting lots of A’s and breezing through the AP exam. After the AP Lang exam, we began the process of writing our college essays in the class. My teacher taught us to write about a topic we cared about in a way that would be intriguing for the reader. Surprisingly, I found writing my college essay enjoyable and felt proud of my work when I was done.
When I began researching colleges and majors, I stumbled across journalism and having just finished writing my college essay and enjoying the writing process so much, I was intrigued. The thought of being able to write about important and interesting topics that I cared about as a career sounded wonderful to me. Fall semester of my senior year rolled around and I decided to take an English 120 class at Hunter College with Professor Jody Polleck. In this class we learned plenty of tips to make our writing stronger and more scholarly. The class focused on researching and discussing various social justice issues and the concept of intersectionality. Following that theme, we had to write two major papers for the course and were able to choose topics we cared about that needed awareness to write about. Learning about real life issues that are not spoken about very often gave me a hunger to use my writing as a way to bring about awareness to issues that are often overlooked. This class meant a lot to me because it really contributed to the confirmation that I want to be a journalist and write about important issues for a career. I have a desire to use my words to bring about change in the world and inspire others.
So to tie it all back to the initial point since I love a full circle moment, my relationship with writing has gone from something that was nonexistent as a child to something that I adore and want to continue doing professionally. My goal is to always improve my writing throughout my career and to keep learning new strategies and skills to make my writing stronger. I write with a purpose and I want to ensure that my word choices are strong enough to get my point across and for my language use to illustrate my passion about each topic. Overall, I want to continue to better myself as a writer for my career because I would like people to truly understand me and enjoy all that I have to say.