Draft 3

Doyle Jones

English 1A

Through out my child hood I was always outdoors.  I have never been the kid to sit inside and play video games.  Hunting, fishing, racing bmx, wheeling and just about any outdoor activity has always been the priority in my life.  I have been building rock crawlers and fabricating parts for years, and I am now going to school for mechanical engineering.  But all that aside I have always enjoyed reading, as long as it was something I wanted to read.  Having a mom that’s a teacher probably has something to do with my enjoyment of reading.  But the older I got the less and less I read. 

For as long as I can remember my mom or dad would read to me every night.  As I got older I started reading more and more by myself.  The more I read the more I wanted to read.  Soon I had shelves in my closet filled with books I had read and books I planned to read.  By about fourth grade my parents would tell me to quit reading and go to bed.  But the older I got the less and less I read on my own free time.  Having to read more and more for school the less I read for fun.  I was never thrilled about having to read some story that I had no desire to read, and half the time I never actually read the material for school. 

As I got older and older I read even less. Reading homework assignments for class meant no homework for me.  Even though I had the coolest English teacher in high school I still barely read.  In class we did grammar packets, to practice grammar or something like that.  Grammar came extremely easy to me, probably due to the amount of books I have read and the fact that my mom is a teacher and I could never use improper grammar without being corrected.  Mrs. Teasley, my awesome English teacher, kind of got me back into reading.  It wasn’t until I took AP English my junior year that really started reading again.  Partly because there was no way I could get through the class just by bullshitting my way though essays and because we read books that were decently interesting to me. 

Then my in my senior English class, Mr. Ramm, my new teacher, informed all of the former AP English students that we didn’t have to do the readings because we had already read most of the books.  This was the best news ever, but he did inform us that we still had to write the essays.  Most days I slept in class, but I the one thing I do remember from his class was he saying that the key to an essay is just writing and bullshitting your way through it.  That has stuck with me and has been my writing technique ever since.  Actually that’s how I’m writing this essay right now.  I remember having to write an essay for Mr. Ramm’s class and having no idea what to write about.  Two days before it was due I was out deer hunting on some private property I have a key to, and I remember driving over to the edge of the canyon and thinking I could write my descriptive essay on the sunset in the canyon.  As I sat there in the bed of my truck writing, a buck came out into the power lines clearing. I grabbed my bow, shot it, found it, gutted it and continued writing my essay.  I actually wrote about that whole scenario and got an A on the paper.  I have always loved being outside and it has always been a form of inspiration for my writing.

As of right now writing is only serving me by getting me grades in classes.  I don’t really write much of anything that isn’t required for a class.  I’m sure that this will be the same way in the future.  I do plan on having to write in my career but I don’t plan on having to write essays that will be critiqued on style, most of my writings should end up being visual writings on engineering drawings, like in solidworks, calculations on my project, proposals on getting my project approved and for getting funding, and lab reports on whatever I happen to be working on.