english essay rough draft

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Zakiya Muhammad
Professor Atkins
ENGW 104-039
September 9, 2015
Keep Writing Ponyboy
For me, reading and writing has always been a way to mentally escape when my thoughts
and emotions would overwhelm me, I would feel slightly better after I wrote everything down.
Being able to express myself through writing is like having a very close friend; there is no
judgment, I am comfortable with saying whatever I need to say and I am able to get my thoughts
out of my head. Reading and writing is spiritual for me; they both give me a sense of release in a
different way. I feel deeply about reading and writing, and practice both every day intentionally
and subconsciously, as if it were my religion. Growing up there have been different aspects that
have affected how I perceived literacy and my thought process: my mother, the different books I
have read and social media.
When I was younger up until now, I have been able to watch my mom do spoken word, a
form of poetry that I would watch her perform during church. I would see her speak on stage and
be amazed because everything about her would be different. Her body language became more
fluid and she would stand straighter, the tone of her voice would be slightly deeper and for that
moment she was not her ordinary self but something more. Everything about her would just
scream confidence; I could look around the sanctuary and see how other people were affected,
how she held all of their attention and how she could make them feel different emotions. With
words she became this phenomenal being that glowed and shined, she became a prophet
spreading Gods words to his people. Being able to witness this at a young age I felt as though I

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gained that ability to lose myself in words and see them for what they really are: power. The way
my Mother influenced me and unintentionally helped me understand how I felt about words, is
the same way Pearl Cleage’s environment influenced her as a writer and her style of writing. In
her interview from The Word: Black Writers Talk about the Transformative Power of Reading
and Writing she discussed how growing up she had no limits on the books she could read and
was always around young black authors. “I think it makes such a difference as a black person if
you not only have books in the house but if there are books written by black authors” (81). She
also spoke of the Shrine, a church and bookstore her father founded and how it was founded on a
political standpoint but also about culture. Cleage’s environment influenced how she felt about
literacy, in this environment she was unintentionally encouraged to become a writer. The same
way her experiences impacted her, watching my mother preform spoken word affected how I felt
towards literacy and what paths I would take in life in regards to reading and writing.
As a child my Mother would read me Chronicles of Narnia by C.S Lewis at night before
I would go to sleep and she would let me play on my LeapFrog, an interactive book to help with
reading, during the day. I loved when she would read to me or let me play on my LeapFrog and I
feel this is what really made me fall in love with reading because it was fun for me. While she
would read I could visualize all the events in the story she was telling me, it was soothing for me
to imagine and picture these scenes in my head rather than focus on reality because of the harsh
realities I was facing. At this point in my life my family was going through some tough times,
with divorce or financial issues and it would help to mentally be in another time and place not
focusing on the bad. I would have a mental reprieve from all the talk about child support and
custody wars, I found something that made me happy during a tough situation. Since then I
would always favor paranormal romance novels because it was easier to get lost in the plot of

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these stories and the conflicts in the stories were not real like the ones I was facing. I enjoy
reading about situations that could not possibly exist and there was always a solution no matter
how big the problem seemed. If I was upset or stressed I could open a book about vampires or
some mythological creature and be put at ease. It would be relieving to be able to completely
lose myself in a book because for a couple days or weeks I would not have to think about
anything else because I would be so involved in the book. I have loved reading since I was
young when my mother introduced books to me in an interesting way, the history I have with
literacy has contributed to who I am as a person today.
Writing is slightly more difficult for me but only in a school setting like Keisha from
Jabari Mahiri and Soraya Sablo’s “Writing for their Lives”, I also felt as if teachers would take
away from my creative side and would require me to conform to the schools standards. In this
reading when discussing Keisha Mahari and Sablo shared what she experienced when writing in
and outside of school, “Keisha noted that while her family and friends outside of school praised
her writing for both its style and content, her teachers often demanded that she alter both the
style and content of her writing significantly” (176). I can also relate to what Keisha experienced
because there have been cases when my mom would read my writing and would give me
complements on my work. But when I wrote in school it always seemed like teachers would take
out the best part and try their best to make it unoriginal, it is also disheartening to have work torn
apart and criticized harshly. Also the topics for writing in school aren’t always interesting and it
is hard to write about something I do not care about. It is much easier to write when there are no
constraints on the content, when writing about topics I enjoy or relate to I can write for hours. I
write as a form of expressing myself not to discuss topics that do not actually mean anything to
me. It helps me prioritize the thoughts going on in my mind and also keep up with current events.

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I believe I am a passionate writer, like my mother I can capture an audience’s attention and I am
good with writing in a way that intrigues the reader. I can elaborate on so many topics and with
my words and write in a very sophisticated way. But I also have a lot of different thoughts and
ideas going off inside my head at once, so at times this can actually make it hard to write and my
thoughts, my words, my ideas can all seem jumbled and at times not make sense. To improve on
myself as a reader I need to step out of my comfort zone and read more classics like, Emma by
Jane Austen, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by
Ken Kesey, because these can help me to become a more cultured writer. By reading these books
I could see how previous writers formatted and expressed themselves and use that information to
improve my own work. Now that I am in college I would like to start transitioning into a more
journalistic mindset because it seems that is where all the great writers begin their journey. I
want to be able to coherently write about issues in society that do not get enough recognition
such as: the fact gender roles are placed as soon as the sex of the baby is revealed, how woman
are still getting blamed for causing their own rape, or how some young girls feel obligated to
have sex just because of the situation they are in. To get to this point I obviously need to work
hard in my classes and practice my writing, but I also need to find internships and build my
credibility. Building from that the end goal I would like to accomplish is to become a well-
known novelist, I want to be able to give people the same feeling I get when I read a really good
book. Words never die, a book will always be the same and the idea of that intrigues me because
I want a piece of me left on this world when I am no longer here to tell my story.
As a person gets older their thought process will change and that is just facts nobody
stays the same throughout their entire life. What a person believes as a child or a young adult
will not be the same because different life experiences will occur. I was the youngest girl and the

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baby of the family so I always had everyone’s attention, I got everything and anything I would
ask for. I asked for a puppy and got it the next day, at this time of my life I believed life was
simple, I was spoiled and received anything I asked for. Other than that simple thought I did not
have anything else was going on in my mind, I followed my parent’s rules and asked no
questions. I repeated their thoughts and feelings, I did not have my own beliefs it was copy and
paste for me: I took in what my parents would say and would duplicate it. That thought process
did not really change for me until sixth grade because I started reading more and began thinking
for myself more often. The books that affected me the most was the Twilight series by Stephanie
Myers and the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, these books did not teach me anything
but they were different from anything else I had ever read before. With these books it was like
my mind expanded, and whenever I read I would keep pieces of the characters with me. In
middle school I was always reading a new weird book, that is all I really thought about and I was
not interested in boys unless they were a character in a story. As I got older and stopped
repeating everything my parents but then started listening to what my peers and others believed
and was not thinking for myself. At the end of middle school and beginning of high school I had
a cookie cutter mind, everything was black and white in terms of my beliefs. I had a very
distinguished line between right and wrong and good VS bad meaning: no drugs, no alcohol, I
would wait till marriage to have sex, being gay was a sin and girls who have too much sex are
hoes. But as I matured and began to have my own beliefs my ideals became less black and white
and more like Fifty Shades of Grey. I gained new experiences, read different books and slowly
my feelings towards certain ideas/topics changed. By the time I was a junior in high school my
mindset from what I believed in my previous years. At this time I believed having sex before
marriage was okay if I was ready, doing drugs/drinking were not that serious and I stopped

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agreeing with what everyone would say about gay people. I do not know when these changes
happened, I started reading books with more sex scenes and boys became more interesting. The
music I listened to and the shows I watched would influence my thoughts and beliefs. I was
really into the show Skins: UK, a British teen drama, and I just thought everything about the
show was interesting and it impacted my thoughts. All these different aspects and experiences
slowly began chipping away my previous mindset and reshaped it into something else, it was like
being melted down and molded into a new shape. My senior year is when my beliefs really
expanded, I began keeping a journal and was not concerned about how people perceived me. I
figured if I like sex and I am single then I will enjoy myself. That is when I started to think about
slut shaming and how young woman should be able to be sexually liberated and not have to
worry about being criticized by others because of their sexual preferences. I stopped accepting
the social sexist norms enforced by society and that was freeing because I was no longer
contained by everyone else beliefs. I began feeling different about topics like abortion because if
a woman cannot afford an abortion how is she going to afford a baby? The procedure should be
affordable or free. When previously I argued against abortion and believed that the procedure
should not even be allowed. I realized with not just abortion but all controversial topics that just
because society says it is morally wrong does not mean it is and vice versa. My views on racial
issues also changed as I became more socially aware of the racial tensions in society. I would be
on Tumblr and would read articles about different hate crimes and other controversial topics and
relate them back to my life as a young black woman. Becoming aware of not only the racism but
also the Eurocentric standards of beauty in society made me think of what I believed as a young
girl and how I begged my mom to let me get a relaxer. When I was younger I subconsciously
wanted to look white, I wanted long straight hair not the thick bushiness I was born with, and I’m

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so happy I grew out of that mindset. I thought about my freshman year when white boys would
tell me that they always wanted to have relations but not a relationship with a black girl, and
expect me to take that as a compliment. I also began to hang out with a new group of girls that
encouraged my new way of thinking and encouraged me to wear my natural hair. Even though I
came a long way with my beliefs I am still trying to expand myself, I want to have an open mind
to everything and not shut down something because I do not understand it. As a thinker I do not
want my beliefs to be judgmental or bias, I want to have my own genuine opinion and not a copy
and paste of someone else’s. I have grown as a thinker throughout my life and in the future I
want to continue to grow, I do not ever want to get comfortable in one specific mindset. Reading,
writing, thinking and my beliefs all go hand and hand. I hope that one day I will use all of these
aspects to become a better person and a better author. Words are beautiful and meaningful and I
am so thankful for how far they have allowed me to come as a person and the power I have from
utilizing them