Writing: Love It or Hate It, Ya Still Gotta Do It

Writing. Such a small, but meaningful word that will make some cringe and others light up at the sight of it. It seems to me that there is no love/hate relationship with writing; you either love it, or you hate it, and these feelings are a result of your past experiences with writing. While these feelings may slightly change over time, once high school comes, the negative or positive attitudes students have towards writing are engraved in their brains.

For me, writing is not easy. It probably takes me two times as long than normal students to write a paper. However, I think this has mostly to do with the fact that I'm a perfectionist. I try my best to always turn in good work, no matter what kind of work it is. While writing has been and still is a challenge, I love it. With the amount of practice I've had with it, I feel like I've become a fairly good writer, and when you're good at something, you enjoy doing it.

Regardless of whether you like writing or not, you have to do it. There is no way around it. Writing doesn't just stop once you reach a certain age or certain part of your education or work. You need to know how to write to be a functioning member of society today. Communication at this day in age is largely through email or text messaging. In order to relay your message effectively, you need to know how to write well (i.e. with correct punctuation, capitalization, spelling etc.). I believe all this shorthand stuff like "u" for "you" and "2" for "to", for example, has got to go. With the amount of time young people spend texting, I wouldn't be surprised if many teachers have found those mistakes in school writing. It would be interesting to see if those mistakes have escalated in the past few years due to text messaging.

As a future teacher, it will be my job to instill a positive attitude about writing in the minds of my students. This will be extremely challenging, and I know there will be students that no matter how hard I try, I will never get them to love writing. Nonetheless, I will allocate numerous hours of practice time during the school year, in hopes that my students will become great and learn to enjoy it. Help me in eliminating the "hate" side of writing once and for all!