Richard Montoya Professor Collin Ludlow-Mattson English 114 3 October 2013

Montoya 1

In this essay I wanted to accomplish a description of what makes reading so interesting and great to me. I wanted to state what made reading interesting for me and what made writing easier for me. I believe that I accomplished the things that I wanted to in this essay. What I learned that was new about how to convey ideas to a reader were that sometimes it is better to state other peoples opinions in certain essays if you have an argument within the essay. I also learned when to use different types of language in my essays, similar to code-switching. I learned different examples of conveying ideas to the reader from "Code-Switching", Sherman Alexie's writings, and many of the other writings that we read and analyzed in class. My opinion of the events that I described in my essay are not different from when I began working on this project. This is because I wrote about events that happened previously in my life and nothing has really changed my outlook on these events. High School will always be the place where I first started to enjoy reading and read more on my free time. It is also the place where writing was really opened up to me and where I would start to enjoy writing classes more than I had previously. In this essay I wanted to convey to the reader my experiences with reading and writing and to show that both of the subjects are not bad or even tedious. They just take some time to get used to them.

Montoya 2 "Discovering a Subject" Rough Draft #3 Many people I knew growing up, didnt really enjoy reading or writing. For books, they would say that it is boring and for writing, they would say that they could not think of any ideas to write about. I used to really dislike both reading and writing. Its not that I was bad at both of the subjects, but to me it felt tedious to write and boring to read a book. As I grew older that changed to where I like reading and writing. This was due to an academic environment that consisted of many great literature and composition teachers. I usually enjoy books that I read on my own time or some of the ones that I had to read for school. Articles on the internet are also interesting to read because sometimes you'll learn something new. It is easy to find interesting things to read about on the internet because there is so much to look through. I started to enjoy reading a lot more in high school. The book that I had to read for Freshman summer reading was Flowers for Algernon. It was a great story that had a sad plot twist at the end. As high school went on, I read many more books such as The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, Catcher in the Rye, The Things they Carried, Cannery Row, All Quiet on the Western Front, Slaughterhouse Five and many more. Each of these books opened us to new vocabulary and new ideas that would open our mind to different ideas. The books I disliked the most in high school were The Great Gatsby and Their Eyes Were Watching God. These two books were uninteresting to me because they didnt really leave you wanting to read more of it. They became predictable early in the novels and they left no room for any cliffhanger or surprise. Reading became overall more enjoyable for me because I found the books that I read interesting. The use of

Montoya 3 foreshadowing in a book sometimes makes you want to continue reading even, if it's extremely late at night. Something about writing changed for me in high school. I was able to write things and let my pen flow. Something just changed in my way of thinking. I used to be very selective with the topics I would bring up and I would hold of a lot of ideas back. My intro to composition class taught me many things that would help me create better ideas also. I would not hold any of my ideas back and it would always help in assignments. This continued to happen throughout high school and I would get better at writing every year. Using this to my advantage, I was able to write better essays than I previously had. I had many different experiences with writing. Mainly because I had to make a lot of essays in both English and history classes. Because of this, I had to differentiate my writing between factual essay writing and English essay writing. In factual essay writing, you have to analyze information, state information, or just reflect on certain information. In standard English essays, I did not need to hold ideas back and I could state whatever my thoughts were on a particular topic. This helped me become more selective with my writing because I needed to know when to use certain writing skills. For history essays, I usually had to look for key points in a document and then quickly find a way how to incorporate it into an essay. In English class essays, we created our own ideas and put them onto a piece of paper. Your objective was to make the essay the best it could possibly be to captivate the reader's attention. Essays writing became easier over time because we had so many of these assignments in high school. Learning how to

Montoya 4 use two different types of writing helped writing become more enjoyable for me because it taught me when to use certain writing skills and how to differentiate between different writing styles. I think this made writing more enjoyable for me because it taught me when to use different types of structures for different essay assignments. Because most of my classes involved a lot of reading and writing, we had to be prepared to write and reflect about the information that we would read for homework. Written reports were another type of assignment that we had frequently. In these assignments we would have to look up our given topic and find enough information to write a five paragraph essay about them. Most of my history essays were timed, so I had to learn how to manage time while I was writing them. If you spent to much time analyzing the data and information that you had or that was given to you, you might not finish the essay in time and it would effect your score. The first few essays I did for this were bad because I started to rush when I was running out of time, but later on I found out how to manage the time that they gave me better and it really helped me process information better. If you were too critical of your ideas while time was running out, you would most likely have an incomplete essay because you suppressed your ideas or the information that you analyzed. These experiences are important to me because they got me to enjoy reading a lot more. It is memorable to me because I enjoyed many of the books that I had to read at school and it got me to read outside of school too. I didnt like the fact that I couldnt just enjoy the book and that I had to take notes about notable and important things in the novels. Although this seems like something that would make me not enjoy reading in

Montoya 5 high school, over time it made me enjoy the things that I was reading a lot more because it made me understand the novels better and it often gave me a more in-depth view of the characters. Looking back at it in hindsight, Im glad that I did this because It gave me a better vocabulary and it helped me to expand and evaluate my ideas about the novels that we read. High school has made writing and reading better for me by making it more enjoyable and less boring. It helps you to expand your knowledge and it gives you something interesting to do if you have some extra time for reading. Reading became more interesting because high school introduced me to books that I would have never read. Writing on the other hand got more interesting because high school helped me expand my writing skills. You could also make time for reading. The lessons that I take away from my story is that things change over time. I used to not like reading and writing, but now I enjoy it a lot more. This is mainly because of my high school experience. These accounts are what made me enjoy the reading and writing processes more during high school. Reading was never really interesting to me until I entered high school. They made us read a lot of different types of books that were all written in different styles and formats. Each had a different tone, theme, and plot. Of Mice and Men was about two men who are broke during the 1920s and they are searching for a job to buy a farm of their own one day, while All Quiet on the Western Front was about a young German Soldier during World War I who felt lied to by the society of his county

because he felt that they lied to him and his friends about the glory and honor of the military. When he and his friends make it to the Western Front Trenches, he soon Montoya 6 realizes that war is hell and that his country has betrayed them. Throughout the book he has to cope with the dead of his close friends and the thought that he might never be able to return home alive. Slaughterhouse Five was about an American soldier who became a POW in World War II. He experienced the bombing of Dresden and he had to cope with it. This book was very different from many of the other books that we had to read because the story was not linear. It would constantly switch to different settings throughout the main characters life. This made the book somewhat confusing but it was also interesting at the same time because it was such a different style of writing. It wasn't one of my favorite books that I had to read primarily because of the jumbled story, however, the story was unique. All of these books both have completely different plots themes, tones, writing styles, and characters. That is what makes every book unique. I probably would have never read these books if it wasn't for my literature classes in high school. There were many more books that I was introduced to in those classes too. My teachers were able to help me improve and excel at my writing and I enjoy writing assignments a lot more than I used to. I am able to use vocabulary worlds that I never thought that I would use at all in my life. I believe that this is part of the reason why I enjoy writing a lot more. Because of having a large vocabulary, I am able to interpret many more things that some people would not understand. Having a large vocabulary lets you read more advanced texts and it helps you retain the retain and view the information

in your own way. An example would be if you were reading an encyclopedia article. It would probably be easy to understand if you knew every word in the article instead of having to look up every word that you didn't understand separately. Reading helps me Montoya 7 look at things from different perspectives and it helps me analyze other things such as writings and articles. I never really thought that I would ever enjoy reading or writing as much as I do now, but my high school experience really changed that. I am glad that I am able to enjoy something that I never thought I would.