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Matthew Nel

Instructor Lucero

English W131

13 January 2020

Activity 1A - Write Reflectively

My most important memory of reading was at age 7, when it was my turn to start reading a book
in class. The book was about 20 pages long with each page having 2 sentences and an image. So
I started reading the book and the teacher had to get something at the principal’s office, but urged
me continue reading while she is gone. Nervously I continued and when the teacher finally
returned, I had read the entire book myself. Although it does not sound like much, it was the first
time I red an entire book by myself in front of my whole class. I will never forget that moment
because everyone in the class was gasping after I finished the book.

At age 13, I was selected as head boy of my primary school in South Africa and I realized that I
had to do all the function speeches for our school. During that year I always dreamt that I would
ruin the function by forgetting the words to my speech and was terrified every time for an
upcoming event. After one of my speeches, a lady came up to me and complimented me on the
projection of my voice to the audience. After that compliment, I was always was full of
confidence to deliver a speech at functions or for an oral.

When I think about a memory of mine that includes writing, I think of a difficult time in my life
when I was dealing with tough situations. I wrote about how the current situation is making me
feel and possible solutions to solve the problem. Writing all my emotions down I felt I was
losing my anger and controlling my emotions better. Writing helped me realize when I was
overreacting and to not be afraid to tell others how you feel.

With my aunt being a poet, writing and reading has always been part of my family and thus I
have a good experience with them outside school. I normally do not get time to write and read
stories as often as I want to because of tennis and homework. When I get time I love to write
action stories with a twist in the end.

With essays counting the most in our final marks for our languages, you always try to write your
best story’s and put maximum effort into them. We had to practice our essays for homework and
the teacher would grade our standard of writing, and helped us improve our ability. So I feel like
I had a great experience in school about writing.
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We also had two books to read as well as twelve poems for our literature test and we did two
orals each term at my high school. So I had a good experience with reading and speaking in my
school.

I believe that my good experiences at home and school has helped me in my abilities to write and
read. It has helped me to be a quick thinker and to come up with a good story in a short amount
of time. I also believe writing and reading my emotions has helped me control them better and
turned me into a much stronger person that does not overreact about situations that does not
matter at all.