English has always been my least favorite subject. The physical act of writing is what I dislike the most about the course, though I did enjoy reading a bit.  I’m not particularly bad at writing and I like reading, but I never was happy with the fact that I had to constantly analyze and write reports on subjects or books I never really cared about. When I was in 1st to 4th grade, most of the writing I did was just a few sentences to see if I could even write clearly and get my point across. I also had to do some mandatory reading which I didn’t mind since my family would often read with me and I didn’t have to discuss what I was reading and could enjoy the activity. As I moved up in grade, I noticed how the workload began to change. I now had to read the books that were assigned to me and write summaries about and started to learn more vocabulary that I was tested on. I remember the change being very drastic when I was young and only became more noticeable in middle school. When I got to middle school, the curriculum started to get us ready for high school levels of work and so for English I had to write my first reports and 5 paragraph essays. I was astonished that they made such a big change that I struggled to get assignments done and often got help from my family to get my work done. Though I had problems in the beginning, I soon learned how to cope with changes and how to organize myself better to get work done. Whenever I had to write an essay or report, I always tried to write them myself first and edit where I thought was necessary before giving it to either my mother or grandmother to re-read and fix any errors I made. This became a routine and helped me build my writing skills up to the point where my family did little to no revisions on my essays. My improved writing skills came in handy when I got to high school where almost everything you wrote had to be 5 or more paragraphs long and in a certain format like MLA. High school English was pretty much the same each year with either teaching everyone how to write professionally or reading a book and doing comprehension questions on it. Because I was doing the same routine for so long, I began to become tired of writing in general since I rarely wrote anything I wanted to and the most I got to creative writing was doing opinion based prompts given to me. This also made me struggle when it came to writing prompts that I had no knowledge of or opinions about the subject and really made me procrastinate which I hated since I had always been on top of my work beforehand. Even now that I’m in college those problems and dislikes about writing still affect me as I continue to delay working on projects earlier and have a hard time coming up with opinions or my thoughts on what’s being asked of me. I find I have no motivation to work even when I have so much time to complete my work and start to sometimes ignore doing my assignments if I feel down or am occupied with other things. I want to get out of this stupor and get back to the way I used to be when I was younger and complete my work on time. I hope that by setting a schedule for myself and sticking to it without making excuses and getting sidetracked that I can re-adjust to how I used to be and no longer be in the depression work aversion I’ve been feeling lately.

Reflection

This piece was the first major writings I did in my English class and was mainly about my thoughts and opinions about English class over my years of schooling. I had to talk about my personal experiences during English class and how my skills were impacted over different time in my life. I would say my essay was rhetorically effective at displaying my lack of enthusiasm about this subject as I provided examples of frustration and troubles with English class.