The invention of written language is allowed for humanity to share and record ideas, Knowledge, and stories for generations. Writing could arguably be the most important thing humans ever invented but even after all its given humanity I still detest it. While thinking back on all the writing I have done, I remember disliking it ever since Elementary. Don’t get me wrong I loved and still love reading but putting pen to paper my brain just short circuits. I’d struggle to piece the words together to get exactly what I wanted to say, often just sitting there thinking and not writing. I remember my teacher saying that “short and concise is the key” and this would be the best and worst advice I took in writing. By making the my writing short, sweet, and straight to the point helped me get my thoughts on paper but would ultimately make me a worse writer. I would end up making my writing to concise and when teacher would ask me to elaborate on something I’d struggle because it just felt like I was unnecessarily adding words just to meet a word count.
Entering into middle school I still struggled in my English classes even having to go to summer school for a year. By the school’s standards I wasn’t a bad writer. My papers would be grammatically correct and formatted but the actual content and words of them lacked quality and would leave me disappointed. It probably didn’t help that the school would put me in accelerated classes. All my English teachers taught English the same way; grammar, spelling and sentence structure would be their main focus. I remember my 8th grade teacher had said to me once “You’re a smart kid, why don’t you apply yourself. Your grade shouldn’t be this low”. It wasn’t for a lack of effort I didn’t get better at writing, it was because I didn’t know how to focus my efforts. Going into high school I only struggled more as the type of writing got more advanced. Digging into deeper meanings, motifs, stuff like. Being such a straight to the point writer I was horribly suited for creative writing. Creative writing is great, I love works of fiction and original ideas in books but I can’t seem to write with meaning.
There’s a perfect example of how writing has gone my whole life. In my Junior year of high school we had to take the ACT test and it had 4 parts, science, math, English and writing. The highest score possible was a 36 for both composite score and section scores except the writing where the highest score possible was 12. In the Math and Science sections i scored a 22 and a 26 respectively but for the English I scored a 16. That’s pretty bad right? Well who would have thought that i could score so low but it couldn’t get any worse right? It did. I ended up scoring a total of 2 out of 12 on the ACT writing portion. The worst part is that I had felt that that was one of the best papers I’d written in terms of content but the scorers begged to differ. Seeing that 2 out of 12 destroyed what little confidence I had in my writing.
Of course I still write as much as I dislike it, I mean I’m college student of course I’d still have to write. Even if i don’t like it, writing is very important in academics. It can effect you later in your career because no employer will hire a person who can’t write a proper report, or email. There can even be social consequences for your writing. If you’ve ever been on the internet(which of course you have, you’re reading this online right now) a person could make the most valid argument but if you have a misspelled word in that argument, most of the replies you’ll get will be correcting your mistake or insults to your intelligence. In the real world some might see you as ignorant if you can’t express yourself in proper English.
To say the least I have a distaste for writing. Me and writing have always been at odds, never quite master it, I still appreciate it for what it is. I understand the importance of writing and all it’s done for the world…but man if why does it have to be so hard.
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