My Creative Writing Experience

Throughout most of middle school and the beginning of high school, I was a very factual person. I mostly read books that were informational and it was rather rare to see me in the fiction section of a library. Even when I was very little, I was more interested in watching a documentary than your standard kid’s show. So, in the tenth grade, when I had to take a creative writing class, I was not very excited about it. However, it was there that I would learn a number of writing skills that would help me in my future writing experiences. I learned a great lesson from that class in that even classes that you might not enjoy can help you later on.
The very first essay that we were assigned to write was a descriptive essay and it was that essay …show more content…
During my class’s group review sessions (which I had never seen in any of my other English classes), I noticed that it was hard to keep my classmate’s attention throughout my essay. Looking back, my early essays sounded rather monotonous. For example, in an 8th grade compare and contrast essay, I wrote “When it comes to color, fresh water fish like livebearers, some tetras, most barbs, gourami, killifish, danios and some peaceful cichlids add color to freshwater tanks. Many fish will also provide subtle color. Some of these fish include hatchet fish, most tetras, Corydoras catfish and some peaceful cichlids.” That compare and contrast essay was a good example of my writing style up until the tenth grade, but it was not great as it was rather repetitive. After hearing an essay like that, the other students in my review sessions suggested that I add more variety to my sentence structure, like following a very long sentence with a shorter one and vise versa. They also mentioned that my hooks needed to be stronger. Being the to-the-point person I was, I used to start my essays with my thesis and then proceed from there. It made perfect sense to me but did not make a good first impression for my reader. So, I started implanting my classmate’s advice and, over the course of the class, my essays got more and more attention and I continued to improve my grade. Even today, in my college essays, I still try use my class’s feedback and add a semicolon (where proper of course) to each of my essays to add variety, and work hard to add a strong hook. It was with the help and feedback I received in those review sessions that I learned how to make my essay interesting no matter the subject