UC Application Essay

Learning to Read: A Love Affair with the English Language

It is around noon, I’ve just finished watching Sesame Street and I’m sitting on the worn rug of the den wearing Osh Kosh overalls and playing with my Etch-A-Sketch. I deliberate with furrowed brows, then carefully carve the letters “B-O-M-B” into the screen. Giddy and proud, I toddle over to my Papa to find out what I spelled. “Bomb, baby, you spelled bomb. Have you been playing with bombs?” He chuckles. I giggle in delight. This is an ongoing game we play ever since I memorized my ABC’s in day school. Fascinated with the fact that these simple figures can create words, I invented a primitive guess and check method of learning how to spell.
Fast forward about two years: it is the first day of kindergarten and a pig-tailed young lady sits with her hands folded in her lap and feet swinging in excited anticipation. Mrs. Reagan asks the class, “Who here knows their ABC’s?” The young lady, along with the rest of the class, raises her hand high and beams. “Very good!” says Mrs. Reagan. “Now who here can spell the word dog?” Promptly the girl’s hand shoots up. “Yes Ms. Michelle?” With the utmost confidence the pigtailed girl replies “D-O-G.” She finishes with a smug smile. “Excellent Michelle, that is correct.” As the exchange continued Michelle, familiar with every word, raises her hand and huffs in frustration when Mrs. Reagan doesn’t call on her. “Alright last word, hmm lets see… how about the word, horse?” Several tiny hands raise cautiously, Michelle’s is not among them. As Oliver Toole spells the foreign word, Michelle realizes that she did not, in fact, know how to spell. What she had been learning to do, was memorize. In her novice mind there was no correlation between the sounds of each individual letter and the word as a whole. She went home that day humbled and distressed.
Experiencing such chagrin from early on had bruised my confidence, creating a mental block for reading and spelling. Through most of my early education I struggled along, unable to forge the connection of phonics. Luckily, I am blessed with an acute memory and was able to pass spelling and grammar with it. I spent my school days oscillating between frustration and daydreams. Daydreaming, I was good at. Fabricating stories about people and things I’ve never met or heard of was a source of solace and distraction. In retrospect, I see that my daydreaming is my earliest form of creative writing, I just did not have means to record my ideas yet.
Then I understood. One day in Mrs. Cortez’s 3rd grade geography lesson I read the word “Atlanta.” It was an unfamiliar word I had not memorized, yet I could still read it. “AT-LANT-A.” Just like that, I fell in love. With this new insight I embarked on reading a real chapter book from the advanced section of the SSR (silent sustained reading) bookshelf. Before my epiphany, I skimmed over heavily illustrated books extracting limited comprehension through my mental word bank. I chose “MA-TIL-DA.” To this day, Roald Dahl is one of my favorite authors. Much like the fictional character Matilda, I devoured books, often reading far above my intelligence level with relish.
I craved more than reading though. I longed to create, to write. Words were my bread and butter, and appropriately my writing journey began in a very logical place, the dictionary. I poured over my Webster’s for hours, collecting words for their the meaning or sound, like coveted gems. Often I played games with the words to see how many words I could discover with the same meaning or vise versa (I now know these are called synonyms and homonyms). At nine I began a journal to keep track of all my treasured words. Sometimes it would take the form of a diary, sometimes as a word jewelry box, but most often I’d use it for poetry and short stories. As I grew as a writer I began to appreciate sentence structure as a frame for my beloved words. My diction is the diamond, and syntax is the intricate setting that composes the figurative engagement ring to the English language I don. Yes, I am proud to admit it, my one true love is words, and I feel it is safe to say we will live happily ever after.