In my personal narrative I reflected on my past literacy and how I have evolved with my writing. Having different perspectives and influences allowed me to develop techniques and learn who I am as a writer.
Expressions can be represented in many different ways and is an important factor to have in life as it allows others to sympathize and view things from your own perspective. In junior highschool there was and still is one of my most influential writers to push me to my biggest potential, Leslie Riche. She knew how to get her students’ creative juices flowing and did sprint writing exercises where for the first 10 minutes of class we had to write the entire time and not put our pencils down no matter what even if we were writing nonsense. The point of this exercise was to get us out of our comfort zone and let our minds run free. We then would volunteer to share what we wrote and it showed that we all aren’t great writers and it is okay to let your peers read your work. It brings another perspective and context to your words, some of us would write about our pets, families and others about their favorite foods. It didn’t matter what mattered was, how can we all learn from one another and support each other while critiquing what could have been done better. Now going into highschool I entered into my english classes with confidence but also room for growth. Admitting that you have weaknesses in certain styles of writing is admirable and shows you care about your writing and education.
I still feel very conscious of who reads my writing, especially the valuable ones because I dislike making myself vulnerable. A statement an English teacher said which was stated by Maya Angelou that always resided with me was, “you can’t use up creativity, the more you use, the more you have”. It gives purpose to our minds that allows us to keep going without any reasons to stop, writing is never ending and a form of therapy to some. As I continue this journey of writing I try to maintain creativity because having the ability to tell a thrilling, sad, exciting, happy, angry, vengeful, and suspenseful story the list goes on, authors all around the world use writing to tell their stories. Another quote my teacher would say is “a book is a dream you hold in your hand”, meaning every author bleeds their hearts onto those pages for readers to feel how attached they are to their writing. Everyone has different dreams and reading about others gives hope to those who don’t believe they can dream. Writing gives people desire and ambition to be better than they were before, to let their words change themselves through others. I appreciate all the wonderful articles, magazines, books and all other forms of writing because they widen my perception of the world.
