Abstract
My mother tells me the first alphabet I ever formed was an ‘elle’. A lower case ‘elle’. Although my ‘elle’ looked more like a caterpillar gliding on a green apple my mother always insisted that it was a perfect lower case ‘elle’. I beg to differ; I think it was just a squiggly line. Like everyone else, writing began for me in school. I don’t remember learning the alphabet or constructing my first sentences but I do remember the spelling bee in middle school; that is when my obsession with words began.
My journey on a never ending voyage: how I learnt to write
My mother tells me the first alphabet I ever formed was an ‘elle’. A lower case ‘elle’. Although my ‘elle’ looked more like a caterpillar gliding on a green apple my mother always insisted that it was a perfect lower case ‘elle’. I beg to differ; I think it was just a squiggly line. Like everyone else, writing began for me in school. I don’t remember learning the alphabet or constructing my first sentences but I do remember the spelling bee in middle school; that is when my obsession with words began.
Disappointment. Disappointment. EASY. Okay. Here I go. D – I – S – S – A – P – O – I – N – T – M – E – N – T. Oh my God, yes, that was a piece of cake, I’m going to the district bee, what? What did you say? thud….. What? thud….thud….thud…. OH MY GOD! thud…thud…thud…thud… NO! thud..thud..thud..thud..thud.. What? Two what? thud.thud.thud.thud.thud.thud ‘Esses’, two ‘pees’ not two ‘esses’. Oh my God. Thudthudthudthudthudthadthud. Disappointment.
Earlier in the week my English teacher had taken a 100 word vocabulary test. She said that one top scorer from each English class would compete in a school bee and the top 3 winners will get a chance to participate in the district bee. I was the top scorer in my class. My teacher handed to me what was supposed to be my most coveted possession: a book of spelling bee words for the seventh level categorized according to easy, medium and hard. I was supposed to study it religiously and so I did. My mom first quizzed me on the entire booklet so we could rule out the words I already knew. Next, I started going through the list one by one, starting with the ‘hards’, then the ‘mediums’, and then the ‘easys’.
At the end of the week it was time to play survival of the ‘spell-ist’. There were fourteen kids and forty-five minutes down the line half had already spelled a word wrong. Seven kids were remaining and my turn was about to come up again. The kid who went before me had to spell out the name of a fruit with three ‘ayes’ and two ‘enns’. Its yellow, long, the skin peels off and kind of looks like the second alphabet I formed as a kid, a ‘jay’ that looked like a diagonally placed concave lens. I had to spell disappointment. Nonchalantly, I blurted out the alphabets and like the squiggly ‘elle’ that I had formed as a kid, I squiggled a ‘pee’ which looked, or in this case sounded like an ‘ess’. My heartbeat increased a notch higher each time I made one word query. The thud thud thud’s climbed up from my chest like a caterpillar, glided over my throat like a voyage across an apple, and penetrated my mind like a butterfly that would not stop fluttering its wings. The thud thud thud’s pulsated in my mind.
To be able to write you have to be able to speak. They go hand in hand. In the eighth grade I took a speech course and that is where my learning process truly began. We had a journal that we had to write in everyday. We could write about anything and read out our thoughts on a voluntary basis. Each week we had to prepare a speech. I wrote informative speeches, persuasive speeches, how-to speeches, and goodwill speeches. The first time I remember expressing my self creatively was on my persuasive speech. My topic was drug abuse. The first line of any speech, according to my teacher had to be attention grabbing. While browsing through books and the internet I came across my favorite line: “drugs are like chemotherapy without cancer.” I still remember the smile on my teachers face when he heard that line and a felt soothing thud thud thud’s in my heart because I knew that he was scribbling down something positive on the score sheet. I got a 96 on that speech and I still quote that sentence each time I write about drug related issues.
Freshmen year in high school I studied word roots. According my teacher learning the Latin roots to words can make it easier to decode difficult words and spell better. Freshmen year was also the first time I wrote a book review and read Shakespeare. The SAT vocabulary words came in the tenth grade. We had weekly quizzes and group discussions about the novels we were reading. By the eleventh grade I had a hefty vocabulary and it was when I truly learnt to write and express myself. Everything before that was basic sentence construction, using big vocabulary words and putting thoughts down on paper in an organized manner with the exception of my ‘chemotherapy without cancer’ speech in middle school.
Junior year transformed my writing. My teacher told the class not to use ‘beavers’. It took me a week to figure out that she was actually saying ‘BEE VERBS’: am, is, was, are, be, being, been. I wrote an entire essay without a single ‘be’ verb, it was 250 words long and it took 4 days to write. She told the class she learnt to write through mimicry. She would read Theoureau and Emerson and try to imitate their sentence structure and copied their style. I discovered that Theoureau refrained from the ostentatious display of words whereas Emerson constructed sentences that would challenge Einstein. The plethora of writing assignments developed my creative writing and gave me a tool to express my feelings. I learnt how to ‘show’ and not just ‘tell’. She was the first teacher who said that every one has beating heart but the kind that crawls up from the chest to the mind belongs to a ‘pennoisseur’, a pen expert.
Junior year was also the year of perfecting the college application essay. One assignment required researching state colleges and using their admissions essay topics. My teacher supplied the class with admissions earning essays written by her previous students as examples. One of my favorite assignments was painting a picture with words. All the students had to go out and get a real piece of artwork. It didn’t have to be the real Rembrandt and the poster versions sufficed. One kid in class interpreted the story behind Van Gogh’s Starry Night and inspired me to write a part two that would eventually serve its time on the ‘writers wall of fame’ for a week.
Senior year the creative writing took a back seat and focus shifted towards literature, how to compile reports and write research papers. This was an important learning period because I was introduced to the kind of work that would be expected in a college classroom. I wrote my first 6 page paper in my government class and all the research had to come out of books. That experience doesn’t seem so exhausting anymore compared to infinity paged college research papers. In college I mixed the creative and the practical. Research became an important aspect of every assignment and I thanked my teachers for instilling the basic concepts in me. College has helped me enhance my writing skills because I started reading a vast variety of books. As I read authors who belonged to different cultures I realized that they had vast differences in their writing styles. What my English teacher said in high school proved to be very true. With each book I read I enhanced my writing skills because I continuously observed their style and embedded it into my own writing.
Squiggly ‘pees’ turned into ‘esses’ or not, spelling words helped me embark upon a journey that taught my how to paint with words. I learned that in the world of creative writing the ‘elle’ had to be squiggly and the ‘jay’ a diagonally positioned concave lens. My learning process has still not ended and I continue to grow everyday as a writer, a communicator, and as a person.