Personal Essay Example: My Writing Experience

I am a decent writer in my opinion I have never been highly skilled in writing, although I think that I understand the general make-up of both descriptive and expository writing. I have always had a love-hate relationship with writing because if it is something like journalism or personal it is fun and more manageable. If it is writing about a specific book or moment from a book. In high school, most of my English essays were based on the book we were reading and our understanding of the prompts. Not all my high school writing career was based on books, but the majority was. 

In my freshman year of English, I had a fantastic teacher who tried to follow the Colorado curriculum. All the while making it fun for her students and easier to follow than other English classes. One of my favorite units was writing vignettes like the book The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. I loved that unit because it was some of the easier papers I had ever written. It was like I was reliving memories from when I was little that I had remembered. I also believe that this class was one of my highest grades in English because she was an easy grader. I also enjoyed the Romeo and Juliet unit because she had us act out the play as a class, which helped us understand the material to write about. 

During my sophomore year, I had a peculiar English experience because, over winter break, the school had switched my teachers and blocks. The reason that the classes had been changed was due to the school switching what period my Spanish two class was. My first-semester teacher was very lenient and seemed willing to push back due dates. When they changed the classes, I found out that the other class hadn’t read the books we had yet and read the other curriculum books. This had made this an easy class, although the prompts were different, which was a nice change of pace, but also made the class boring because I had already covered the curriculum. This was one of the years of English that I disliked the most because it was a repeat of the first semester, which was really annoying and boring. 

My junior year of high school was one of my favorite English classes that I have ever taken, not only because of the curriculum but also the teacher I had. She was an excellent teacher and was very appreciative of the little things. She allowed the students to move at their own pace on units, and they had to be turned in by the end of the unit. This class for me helped me learn to enjoy writing and helped me understand how to link books to more creative writing. In this class, we read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and one of the assignments was to relate a song to a character and back up parts of the lyrics to lines from the book. I had never had an assignment like this before, and this was something that was very creative to me and was enjoyable. The entire unit for this book was very creative and made my dislike for English diminish.  

In my senior year of high school, I had a strict English teacher who graded your papers how her rubric was written and was a very harsh grader. The way she graded the essays helped me become a better writer if I had a lenient teacher. It made it easier to make repeating mistakes. One of my favorite units my senior year was when we had to do a research-based podcast on something we were interested in. It helped me understand how to write research papers and because I was able to do it based on something I was interested in, I didn’t feel like it was boring. I get bored quickly when it comes to writing because some things are just not exciting and seem like I am rewriting a paper or essay that I have written before. 

I am a little scared to see how I will do in this class, considering it has been roughly six months since I last wrote an English paper. With the right help from my peers editing my assignments, I will do better than I think. I have never been the best at writing, but I believe that the way this class is set up will help me fix my writing flaws and improve my writing overall.