how To English: May 2014

Brian Ingebretsen

5/9/14

ENGL 1A

The Ink within a Heart

My literary history is somewhat in its prepubescent stages; I understand the dynamics and mechanics but I have yet to do anything remarkable with it. I enjoy writing to the fullest extent; I love where your ideas can take you and I love the satisfaction of creating well thought out and profound statements such as this one. To me, writing brings about blissful solace while simultaneously delivering a message that is both powerful and assertive, cementing the written word as the pinnacle of the conveyance of ideas. The writing in my life will be ever changing and with the help that I have received from my teachers combined with what I learned from my experiences, I know that my writing ability has only begun to blossom.

I grew up in the small town called Pleasanton in the state of California and I took to reading at young age. I loved reading so much that it developed into a love of writing theory and from then on I would always picture and plot the perfect ideas of how to properly write important essays and how to create grand spectacles with story writing. Having a novice and premature writing though process, along with only using the diction and syntax that I had known at the time, it’s safe to say that in my early years I wasn’t a very good writer. I had many great ideas but due to my stubbornness and laziness, they rarely got out onto paper which is ironic because if I wasn’t told to write, my ideas would flood onto the paper and many wonderful stories would be born onto the Earth. Little by little, however, I learned how to write more importantly and under time constraints getting my ideas across in a creative and relevant way; I grew out of my stubbornness and began to write. Once I got into high school, my writing had just passed the threshold of mediocrity which meant that I had been underprepared for what the higher education had in store for me. This would prove to be my downfall in the beginning but with the right teachers, I had trekked into a new dimension of writing that I had never once entered before. I was able to add emotion into my writing, it wasn’t just a school essay anymore and it was a testament to myself and to what I have been through. I used my experiences to fuel the paper, I professed tangible emotion to the reader so they would remain entranced and become unable to place the paper down. I had done this even for the most obscure of papers such as a book review or a compare and contrast piece because that creative and romantic spark had electrified my style. However, I was still missing the story telling aspect of my writing, I had the connections and the depth but I needed to develop my story. At about the same time I was just beginning American Literature in my junior year of high school with a teacher who had a reputation of being one of the hardest and whom, indeed, lived up to the name. During that period of writing growth, I had to read many American Classics including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby which, still to this day, is my all-time favorite novel. There was a distinction to the book; so much description, emotion, and romance all in an elegant story about the harsh morality of the 1920s and its customs. This had launched the inception for what kind of writer I had wanted to be; I wanted to dance in my paper, to journey to distant lands and live out the adventures being portrayed such as the way Fitzgerald throws you into the being that is Nick Carraway. Though it was difficult, I developed that new story aspect to my writing therefore completing my goal, now I could now tell a story with depth and emotion by taking my experiences and my emotions and letting them pour into whatever I was writing. This especially helped with scholastic research essays in particular because I could apply my own experiences and emotions to the facts that I cite and actually make my paper alive not just the bland and robotic factual paper that is the norm at school. Mrs. Pagtakhan is her name, my English teacher at the time, and she is the defining figure in my journey of the written word because she helped us crtitque our essays as if we were all literary scholars. There was never an A paper in the class but the way that she taught you to write made you feel as if you had gotten a phenomenal score , with her tips and tricks to the occasional blast on the paper, she helped me really get into what I was writing and dive deep into the material. Now that I have entered college I believe that I have all of the ingredients to conceive a fantastic paper and maybe even someday, a novel.

Unbeknownst to myself, my writing achievement had also affected my personality and the way I look at others. I learned to convey more emotion and look at things in regards to depth and symbolism to fully understand someone. My emotional growth came, not in the form of writing, but in the form of psychoanalysis which opened my eyes to what humans really think and feel. I learned what triggered emotions and how to trigger emotions, I learned that we are all uniquely different even if we look the same and because of the experience I have learned to view humans in a more eloquent light. This understanding allowed me to humanize as well as romanticize my papers to make a lasting effect on the reader and to even help them perceive things in a more eloquent and thoughtful light. With these developing skills I am ready to succeed in my college career and into my future, using this ability at work, with my family, and my everyday life. I am a biological science major and my goal is to become a forensic biologist who works in a lab and uses superior skill to solve cases and provide justice back into a dangerous world. Though the only writing I would be doing would consist of lab reports and police reports, my people skills will help me just as much as the evidence. If I can make the suspects or victims comfortable I can get more out of them, using their valuable information to help stop a killer or a thief. With this new skill, I can already see the stars of success in my future.

Writing encompasses everything that we do whether it is scientifically or personally related. It takes us places that we may or may not want to go it’s that powerful and affects the way people feel towards one another. Writing divides and pulls together, it hurts and heals, and it ultimately makes the world a better place. Writing is a time machine, it is a future entity and it can stop violence which makes it an invaluable skill to mankind. Writing is viewed in hundreds of different perspectives; right now you are feeling different about reading this than I am writing it. There are different experiences that can go into an essay like this and those experiences often turn the paper into a completely different story. This is why the concept of writing will never be perfected and why it will keep on changing and improving and getting better, there will always be different interpretations of writing as well as different feelings towards it.

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