Family

Ever since I was young I always thought that I had poor grammar, which has led me to believe that I am a lousy writer. This is because English is not my first language. This made it difficult to understand people when I was younger. In kindergarten, I was shy and reserved since I wasn’t used to talking in English. Also, my parents do not have the best English skills so they only spoke to us in Tagalog at home. Still, I made friends and got used to speaking English. By the time I went to elementary school I was a lot more confident in my speaking. This has made it much easier to write, but of course it still needs work. English has not been one of my strongest subjects, but it is slowly improving. In school, whenever my classes assigned a large writing assignment I would always get worried since I thought my writing was poor. For example, the junior research assignment last year worried me a great deal, because if there were more than 5 errors in the paper it would be counted as a zero. Because I knew I would make a ton of mistakes, I got multiple people, that I knew were great at English, to peer edit my paper and check for mistakes. After I got my paper back and saw that it was not as awful as I thought it would be, I felt more confident about my writing skills and felt I could further improve. I think it’s important to realize this false truth that I am a bad writer now because during this last year of high school I will still have time to fix it. School has helped me many times in learning English and improving my writing, so during my last year I can dedicate more time into English class to learn and try to excel at writing. If I am able to become more confident in my writing and grammar then I believe it will help me in my future. This will be especially true in college, since fixing my writing will help me write my papers and eventually help me get a good job.