Friday, April 30, 2010

Teaching the Art of Writing

I helped my sister write a paper for a scholarship she’s entering. Somehow I became the essay expert and since my freshman year of high school I’ve been helping all of my brothers and sisters write their essays. I’m not a fantastic essay writer. I know that I’m majoring in English but I still have yet to master punctuation and formal word usage (also using big words), but I am amazed at how….bad my sisters and brothers are at writing. It kind of amazes me that they can’t write an essay and make it sound professional. It’s times like this that I realize everyone isn’t good at everything. There are things that some can do and things that some cannot do. And while you feel smart and great doing the things that you can do you have to realize that not everyone has that come so easily to them.

Usually when one of my siblings comes to me with school work I take over. The last essay my sister Erin had to write I snuck on her computer, which she left in my room, and finished the essay. Tonight though I just gave my sister, Chelsea, a prompt and told her to write what she felt should be written. After she wrote it out and read it back to be I tweaked it a little, but not as much as I usually would. Although this was different than before since it was a essay about her and she knows herself better than I would I think I’m going to try and continue to work this way. Not only will I stop getting blamed for their papers not grading so high but it will teach them how to write on their own. I can’t continue to have them come into my room saying “we have a lot of work to do” and then basically so their work for them. I think it’s time they stop being so dependent on me. Not for everything but for things that they need to accomplish on their own.

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