-I don't remember much about my first experiences with reading and books, let alone remember some of the first books that I've read. As I grew older, I looked at some comics such as Calvin and Hobbes and a Chinese comic series in which most things were understood by the pictures, as well as a few things like Richard Scary children's books. My parents didn't read to me or bother to tell me to read regularly; they are deaf. I personally thought it wasn't entertaining anyway. My parents presented more of an artistic personality, sometimes drawing random pictures, renovating the rooms of the house and other things that are crafted with hands. That, I thought was interesting. I guess the reason why I was caught into reading things like Calvin and Hobbes was because of the pictures or "art" represented on the piece of paper, rather than looking at a bunch of letters and words. The books I've owned when I was younger -and I rarely ever read when I was a kid- were mostly a collection of Calvin and Hobbes. As for other books I had since I was a kid, I don't even know where or when I got them.
-Considering that my parents are deaf and didn't have an efficient way of teaching English to me themselves, I wonder about who it was or were that taught me how to speak and write. As I reflect on myself today, I recall taking a "Structure and Origin" class for the English major. I was surprised to see how much trouble my classmates were having while, of course making a bunch of mistakes, the majority of the class's content seem like a review or refresher of what I've learned years ago. If I was to make a guess, it would seem that I would have done decent, at the least, at learning the English language when it was taught to me in my childhood. I never played with writing before I went to school. Writing back then really just seemed like a school thing to me. I wasn't prompted to write anything unless it was for some kind of schoolwork.
-I first started writing when I first had a huge breakaway from my family. I wasn't much of the letting-it-out person, so I coped with keeping it in. I learned a while later that it was easier on me by writing. That's when writing became an important factor in my life. At the age of 16 in my sophomore year of high school, I started writing poetry, initially to keep myself from staying angry or upset. But eventually, it became a hobby. I mean, I always had a thing for all things creative, but once I've learned the English language outside the school buildings, I played around with words, rhymes and metaphors. Now I always find myself noticing rhymes when they aren't intended by other people and try to avoid making rhymes in regular conversation due to the self-conscience level of writing as a hobby and being that person who has somewhat excelled at English (grammar, let's not get confused with the "English" we call reading for our courses in school) and writing. The "School versus home" concept did have an impact on my writing, but not in a thoroughly academic sense. In high school and down, we weren't really taught to write creatively, only critically. Why couldn't we learn, or should I say experiment with, both? As the high school continued to teach me "Language Arts" in school, I was learning true language arts at home or on my free time by experimenting with words and phrases, matching syllables and rhymes and the sort. Although we learned different methods of writing such as using metaphors, ethos and pathos, we would be forced to write on academic topics with these methods. This wasn't really how my writing developed. If I was to be honest, it was that drama that goes on every other second in high school. It was the emotion in that teenage part of a persons life where friends are right, family is wrong and relationships were better off not happening. I learned to deposit my emotion onto paper and using creative sentences and phrases to create pieces of works.
-We've always had a computer in our home. I used to think it was amazing when my father first had a laptop. But I've been playing video games since I was very very young. Technology wasn't a sudden shift in my life; I've always dealt with it. From blowing cartridges for games that didn't work properly every time I turned on the game console to playing around with paint before Photoshop was created, I learned about technology without knowing what it was called. The major shift that I had was when I started to write. I became more aware of "technology" as I grew attached to placing emotions onto paper. In high school, technology was welcome (using computers to search articles for research papers and searching through library databases) and technology wasn't welcome (the use of cellphones and distracting items). Technology was basically an everyday thing to me. I used to enjoy being creative with fonts and sizes when typing, then changing the colors of the letters and the background. Early on, I wrote poetry with a keyboard, and, years into the future, I've become so accustomed to it that I don't really have a fair say in whether writing or typing is better. For the most part, technology had guided me through my writing years, so there's no reason really for me to give it two thumbs down.
-Regarding schools, I think most students don't become aware of how much we will end up reading in the future until we reach middle school. That's where all the "hard" word comes in. In elementary school, we definitely do read. We definitely do write. But sometimes, elementary school seemed like a sanctuary. It was a place to be with friends, doing all kinds of projects that seemed fun back then; we never really looked at it as "work". In middle school and onward, reading increased. Writing increased. Innocence decreased. We can definitely say that there are very mixed feelings about technology, the internet and the use of any of these things. We can definitely say that there are events in the world that have made people blame technology or personally hate it. This "innocence", just like the innocence we "lose" after "growing up", is the same. We don't do these handmade projects like we used to. We don't write on every since tests. We begin using programs allowed by the school for a computer science class and we begin using scantron sheets (dare I say "scan" and "tron" both make people think of technology in some way or form).
--Regarding friends, family and reflection on myself, I can say that these are the biggest factors of in my writing. Sure you learn how to write "properly" in school and end up writing a paper or two for almost every single class, but it seems so repetitive that the only difference is the books we "read" and the topics we write about. The style is ALWAYS the same. Five page paper. Five paragraphs. How about four lines? How about 4 stanza. Isn't that one of the basic forms of poetry? At least that's what I think. There are MANY forms of poetry and creative writing, but the only form of writing we learn is academic writing. This is where my friends helped me along my journey of writing. Being with friends, being with family, being without them, getting in fights, having awesome nights; This is what enhanced my writing ability, though my development of writing about different topics or of a different style hadn't start to bloom until years later in college.
-Personally, I feel as if digital technology doesn't have a major effect on my writing itself. The one thing I feel that this effects writing is that instead of writing on paper, we "type" words which is a faster but, unfortunately, lazier method. In terms of effectively accurately expressing what I want, I can use dictionaries and thesauri online to help me write when I'm looking for specific words or meanings.
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