How My Experience Helped Me Love Writing Essay Example
Growing up, I was raised in a non-English speaking family. My mom and dad were both from Vietnam and spoke very little English. Majority of the time, they would only speak in Vietnamese to my brother and I at home. By the time I was about to start elementary school, my English abilities were limited, so I had to take a quiz to see if I needed ESOL. The teacher showed me a few pictures, but I couldn’t seem to name most of them. Because of this, I had to take ESOL to improve my English throughout elementary school. In this class, I had a great teacher that assisted me on how to read, learning new words while reading, and improving my writing. I started to learn new English words and understand the language better. However, I still didn’t improve my writing skills when we were assigned to write paragraphs and essays, so I ended up staying in the class until the last year of school.
At the end of 5th grade, my teacher told me I wasn’t required to take ESOL in middle school, so I decided not to continue taking it. During middle school, particularly the 7th grade, I started having problems with my English teacher, grammar, and choice of words in my papers. In addition, I was also aware that my teacher would try to find a small mistake in my writing just to take off points. This made me frustrated and discouraged. Overall, I felt like I was a bad writer. Because of the experiences that I faced in middle school, instead of enjoying it, I was always stressed out about making my writing assignments perfect just to get a good grade. Despite dealing with that challenge, I had meetings that I attended. Being one of Jehovah's Witnesses, we would have meetings twice a week.
A part of that meeting included a discussion of the watchtower, which we had a chance to take part in and share our thoughts on each question that was discussed. As a result, before the meeting, I would prepare a few comments for the discussion. Most of my comments that I wrote were straight from the paragraphs but sometimes I would include my thoughts or personal experiences as well. I believed that writing comments for the meetings has helped me practice writing, prepare for my English classes, and made me become a critical thinker. Once I started high school, I began to gain some interest in it. In my sophomore year, I started to connect my personal experiences in my writings.
Even if we had to write about the book we were reading in class, I would try to express my feelings, thoughts, and beliefs in it as well. Adding a few of these ideas was an important part of my writing. Personally, I thought that it made my papers interesting. For this reason, it helped me think deeper and to be creative. Additionally, it made writing more fun for me personally. Moreover, I learned about paraphrasing which taught me on how to use different words when I have a writing assignment. Further, I did extra research and looked at websites to understand the topic that I was writing about.
Throughout high school, I felt like my writing has improved a lot even though there’s still flaws at times. One of my favorite writing assignments that my teachers assign are argumentative essays because there isn’t a right or wrong answer. I’m able to prove my response and share my point of view on the topic. Although I didn’t enjoy writing throughout elementary or middle school because of the challenges that I faced, I finally found a way to make it more enjoyable in high school. Specifically, I found it from my experience writing comments for the meetings, which taught me to appreciate writing and helped me to realize that I can add my ideas into my papers.
