Linguistic History

During my elementary and middle school years, I remember writing a lot about my personal life (e.g. my family, my hobbies, my summer vacations etc.). I also wrote a lot e-mails and personal notes to my friends which got me in trouble with my teachers sometimes. Writing about topics that did not interest me was particularly hard for me. It was also hard for me to get past writers block and actually start writing. This usually led to a lot of procrastination because I would get bored every time I tried to start and move on to something else. When I was younger I kept a diary and wrote a little poetry for fun but I also had to write a lot of poetry and also a short story for school. It was hard for me to write poetry that had a particular rhyme scheme or had to be a specific number of syllables but I really enjoyed writing free verse poems in which I could express how I was feeling. Last year my boyfriend was in Iraq so I wrote a lot of letters and e-mails to him but I haven’t done much since he came home in September. I do admit that I do spend a lot of time texting now though.

Reading was interesting to me. During my middle school and high school years I was a member of the Reading Team so I did a lot of reading. My favorite books to read were fiction ones which would take me to places and worlds that I would not get to go to otherwise. My favorite book was a murder mystery called Fall Into Darkness by Christopher Pike.

During my childhood I was very shy and I had a hard time talking to people that I did not know well. It was easier for me to write e-mails and notes rather than to talk to a person one-on-one. Today it is still hard for me to give presentations in class but I have been getting better at that since I became a bartender last summer. Bartending has taught me to open up and not be afraid to start conversations with people. The only writing that I do at work are taking customer’s food orders.

Essay writing and activity writing usually have specific topics that you must write about but the writer is usually the one who choose the topics for e-mails, letters, poems, etc. The audience of essays and activity writing is usually the teacher and peers where as the audience of other forms of writing are usually your friends. Essay and activity writing is also more formal that other forms of writing.