John Lo

Professor Ogden
Engl 1A
31 May 2014
Path to Literacy
I am not a professional reader, nor am I a professional writer. As a matter of
fact, I dont like writing at all, but then writing is a part of life. I was only six years
old when I started to take an interest in writing and also started to learn how to
read. My parents were great readers. They would read to me all the time and
encourage me to read anything I could get my hands on. I would always see her with
a book during her spare time. Indeed, words are the most powerful tool that we
possess. With them, writers have the ability to change the world. But crafting an
essay does not come easy; it is a tedious process. The writing process may seem
discouraging at times; but, in the end, the product reaps tremendous rewards.
When I was in kindergarten, I just started to learn alphabetic, so I was not
able to read because I didnt know what the meaning of the characters. Therefore,
my parents always read some bed stories, and they also explained the meaning of
the stories to me. My favorite story is Snow White, so I asked my parents read this
story a lot to me, and when they read it to me, I could always imagine the image that
snow white lived with seven dwarfs. I even imagined I was the youngest dwarf
among them, even though I had no idea why I wanted to be the youngest one, maybe
I just had some special bonding with the youngest one. Gradually, I could remember
more and more details of this story. I supposed them reading it to me every night
caused the words to get burned into my brain. After all, this story was not only a
simple story to me. I feel like it was my kingdom, and I was the main role of the
whole story. I could change the plot if I wanted. Therefore, there were many
different versions of snow white in my mind. Sometimes, I told my own version of
Snow White to my friends, even though they told me I was wrong, I still enjoyed it. I
think this is the first event that I could have my own thinking based on what I read.
I grew up in China, and when I was in first grade of elementary school, I was
taught how to write academic compositions. Basically, we had to use the characters
we learned to compose a short paragraph, and narrate a story of the picture.
However, the requirement changed as it went further. We had to compose a story
based on a topic, which was harder than simply looking on a picture. Therefore,
thinking became an essential process of the writing. At that time, most of the
topics were about describing the most interesting or the most impressive events of
our lives. However, as a six years old kid, I had no idea what the most interesting or
the most impressive events were, so the teachers encouraged us to read several
relevant compositions that written by other students and wrote down similar
stories; we could even told the same story that we read. Now, I learned these were
actually plagiarism, but it is still a common way of writing in China. I still believe
that we were not allowed to tell our own stories at that time because I tired a lot of
times to write my own stories, but I always got low grades. After my parents asked
the teacher what I should improve about my writing, the teacher just told them
there were nothing wrong with my stories, but she hoped that I could imitate more
of other peoples writings before I stared composing mine. I was upset and
confused. I even thought writing was actually like solving math questions; there
were some specific steps that we had to follow and could not think outside the box.
Therefore, I had a really tough time about writing. Even though I got good grades on
writing, I was still sick about it because I always wrote down the same thing that I
had written so many times.
After I came to the United States couple years ago, I went to PCC to study
English. When I took my first ESL class, my professor asked us to write down
whatever we want to write for 15 minutes every day. During this writing, we did not
have to concern about grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. The only
thing we had to do was writing without stop. This is my first time to know free
writing. Before I took this class, I did not know that there was a way could improve
peoples writing skills called free writing. At the first place, I did not know how or
what should I write when I did the free writing, so I just simply wrote down
whatever in my mind. These could be my feelings or thoughts that I had that
moment, or the worst that I wrote down did not have any sense at all. However, I
kept writing. After practicing free writing for a while, I found that my writing skill
had been improved because I could think in English instead of thinking in Chinese
and than translate to English. When I wrote the compositions, the words and the
sentences were already in my mind; I did not even to think about it, and all I needed
to do was simply writing down what they were. Therefore, for the beginner writers,
free writing is significant because it can help them to gain the ability of writing.
Works Cited
Elbow, Peter. Free Writing. Handout.ENG1A, Pasadena City College: Dr. Kirsten
Ogden.Web.23 May,2014.
Pipher, Mary Bray. "Introduction and Chapter 1." Writing to Change the World. New
York: Riverhead, 2006. N. pag. Print.