Jaime Loynds
My Writing Life Exercise
I will always remember one of my earliest memories of writing, it was in first grade where we would write these little stories, and then we would color pictures. We would put construction paper as covers and give it a title as well. I can still remember this was exciting for us, in first grade because then we would share them with the whole class. Everyone would then go to the carpet and the few people sharing for the day would be able to go in front of the class and share. I still remember at the end of the year I would have tons and tons of these little books in the room, and it felt like forever that I kept them, probably why I remember them so well.
I would personally describe myself as not a good writer because I am not really good at spelling. I have always struggled with spelling since I can remember. With spelling, I find that my grammar is also not the best which adds to the stress of thinking of myself as not a good writer. This now all makes sense because in high school I found out that I have dyslexia. Also, my best friend from home also found writing to be very easy for her, and she was very good at it as well. She would come up with these very elaborate stories in high school and would just be able to write and I would just struggle on the first sentence. I would consider her a writer, but I would also consider my dad as a writer. He would always reread my writing pieces when I was younger and edit them for me. I found that he became a better writer from his job. He was always writing emails and letters for his job as well as speaking in front of large audiences, which I find that always helped him.
When I do write, I found that personally, I am better at writing non-fiction or personal stories. Fiction I find hard for me to write, I would rather have a prompt or something to go off of. Which is very different from that first memory of writing that I have because all those little stories were completely made up. In the past few years, I have tried to become a better writer. I would say it is one of my biggest goals right now personally. I know that I will have to write a lot as a teacher, to my students, other teachers, and parents so I do want to get better for myself. There is not really any specific pieces of writing that stick out to me that I am proud of, I do remember thinking for the longest time that my college essay was a well-written piece for me, but I haven’t read it in a while, and think I that I have gotten better as a writer since high school. Overall just this piece of writing for me was kind of struggling because I had to sit down and write for a long period of time. Even though it was a piece of writing about myself and had prompts I found it quite difficult, when at first I thought it was going to be easy.
