Sehun Bolaji
Personal Essay
During my 11th grade year in highschool, my English teacher was trying to prepare us for the English regents. So she would have us all work on our vocabulary and sentence structure in class and have us do various amounts of essays to ensure our success before the exam. I was pretty confident in myself due to the fact that I always had a 90 or above in all of my English tests during that time. She said to me the reason I had such a good grade on the essays is because she could hear my “voice” in my writing and that I use a lot of vocabulary words. But the day before the English exam however, she told the class that for the argumentative essay that we shouldn’t defend the side that we agree with the most, but defend the side that has the most backup information. This was not something I thought of before and it did sound like the logical thing to do so for the English exam I had started to do so, but because of this I had gotten a low grade on the ELA Regents. I didn’t fail the regents but I thought that the grade I got wasn’t good enough for me. So I was scheduled to take it the year after. During the gap in between I didn’t really study, all I did was do what I usually do, go to school and go home and watch anime and play video games and occasionally go out with friends. Then, when it was time for me to take the test again I came in with confidence, I was determined the write the way I see fit, which was basically the way people in the shows I watch speak because when I do that I use words I wouldn’t think of using before. Additionally it is more fun to me that way. Furthermore, I defended the side of the argumentative essay I agreed with, not the one with the most evidence. When the test grades came back I had gotten a 92 on the regents which made me feel better about myself, made me more confident in my writing abilities.
