Post #14: Letter to the reader

Hi everyone, my name is Krissy, and I’m a senior in high school. I have taken English every year but this year I got the chance to take two electives that I chose that I felt were going to be fun classes. Writing and reading have never been some of my strengths but I have learned so much. I had the honor of working with Ms.Basko for the full year and she has taught me a great variety of writing. I am so glad I took Creative Writing this second semester because I had a lot of fun. Being able to come up with your own original idea for a story and take it away is one of the best feelings during writing. This class gave me to the honor to let my ideas out and write away, avoiding writers block.

            This semester I wrote about seven pieces. I started out with a five-page mystery story that I had never tried to write before and was somewhat difficult but I had a fun time throwing a mysterious aspect into my writing. I feel as though that went so much better than I had planned and I realized that not all mysterious writing is boring. We then started the unit on flash fiction. My classmates and I each wrote five flash fiction stories, and this was not my favorite assignment. Writing fiction is difficult for me because I have a hard time coming about with a story I don’t know much about and don’t have much information about in the beginning. I feel as though non-fiction is so much easier to write because you can more easily write about life experiences in much detail. We then finished off the semester with writing a children’s book. I chose to write mine with one of my good friends and it went very well. We both came up with some funny characters and a fun story with a cute ending. We learned from trying to write a children’s story is it is not as easy as you would think. Trying to come up with words and phrases that are at a children’s level and trying not to make it to lengthy can come with obstacles. Overall I learned a lot about each type of writing we worked with and enjoyed coming up with my own stories and constructing them.

            In writing I have a few strengths and a few weaknesses. A few of my strengths are sentence structure, and adding much details to my stories so you can easily imagine in your head what I am saying. In this course, it helped me to expand on my writing and make my pieces longer, and how to properly deal with dialogue. A few of my weaknesses have always been trying to create a whole story on my own with characters and trying to get the reader to get pulled into my story. I can easily write and write but sometimes it can be boring or not have a good sentence starter and not pull people in well. I also have always had a weakness for putting to many commas in my work; I pause too much. My grammar and punctuation are not usually a problem.

            I am somewhat proud of my work this semester in my portfolio because I feel I have grown as a writer and have now learned to write longer stories and keep the reader hooked and be able to write for the correct audience. Writing has never been one of my strengths but I do enjoy it so with much practice I have had this year, I feel better about my writing. 

Thanks to Ms.Basko for all she has taught me this year.