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Jaida Veiga
Mrs. Tubbs
English 1301-054
July 18, 2020
Feeling Like a Fourth Grader
“In twenty-fifth place for the most accelerated reader we have Jaida Veiga in the fourth

grade!” the principal of my elementary school said at the graduation ceremony. As I walked up

onto the stage, in front of the entire school, I remember telling myself that I will never stop

reading. I loved reading with a passion, and the yearly awards were a nice touch. When Mr.

Castillo handed me my trophy, I saw my parents and little brother waving and smiling at me

from the back of the cafeteria with such a proud gaze upon their faces. I never wanted that

rewarding feeling of pride and joy to leave me. Sadly, that moment was the last time I felt that

way in about nine years. It is now many years later and I have not read a full book since, until a

few months ago, which might be the reason my literary skills are the way they are today.

However, it is now nine years later I my love of reading for enjoyment has resurfaced my life

and my literary skills are slowly starting to kick in once again.

When I was in high school, my main priority was academics and focusing on getting into

college. I took advanced placement classes in English, science, history, and psychology, and

many other normal leveled courses. Those classes, especially the English ones, have helped me

prepare for college-level classes and write at a high school level. Yet, my English classes only

ever taught me how to read and analyze plays and how to write random essays in a certain about

of time. They never showed me how to write different types of essays about how to fix the

mistakes you made while writing them. On the other hand, books are in many different formats

and could have been just as beneficial, or even more, as upper-level high school classes. I

remember when I graduated last fall, it felt great to finally go off to college and start my new life
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in a different city. However, I felt sort of empty because I had already fulfilled my goals at the

time, but something was still missing. I sort of regret not reading during that time of my life

because I believe it could have made me a better person all-around with benefits in grades and

having a wide range of views depending on what I was discussing. When the pandemic first

arrived, I tried out many different hobbies and crafts such as drawing, playing music, and

cooking. Although I enjoy doing those things, they never made me as happy as reading novels

and books did. I remember pacing around my bedroom and sitting around doing nothing for

weeks wondering what hobby I could pick up. It was not until I found an old novel on my closet

floor that I thought about reading again. It was called “Five Feet Apart” by Rachel Lippincott,

Tobias Ianconis, and Mikki Daughtry. It is about two teenagers named Stella and Will that have

cystic fibrosis, a disease that affects the lungs and digestive system. They are told to stay at least

six feet apart from each other because the disease can progress into something worse if patients

come into contact. They then try to break the rules a little bit and turn six feet into five feet, but

Stella ends up getting worse and must be isolated from Will. I am not sure what it was about this

book, but I ended up finishing it in two days and began feeling the way I did back in the fourth

grade for the first time since. After I was done with the book, I started searching the internet for

similar ones. I found novels like The Martian by Andy Weir, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

by Stephen Chbosky, and Beautiful Boy by David Sheff, which ended up being two of my

favorites to this day. From the time COVID-19 was set in motion, I have read about a dozen

novels so far. I have even gone ahead to browse different styles of writing and genres from

essays to series and everything in between romantic coming of age to criminal psychology. With

all the time I have spent reading in the past few months, I have learned so much more than I have

in high school. Books have showed me how to show emotions through writing, how to write in

different ways, how to show contrasting viewpoints, and many more important values schools
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should teach. Lastly, the most important skill I have obtained through writing has been

developing new vocabulary words. I am now able to understand and make sense of a word I have

never seen before with the help of context clues. Back in high school, I was briefly taught how to

use context clues to my advantage but never how to strongly use them in reading and writing.

As I said before, it has now been nine years since the fourth grade, and I have fallen back

in love with reading just as much as I did when I was a little girl. A few months ago, my reading

and writing skills have improved drastically from reading books and novels. I believe they are

even better as they were from the time I were in high school. I now wonder where my literary

skills, and sometimes my attitude, would be at if I never found the book on the bottom of my

closet floor.

Process Reflection
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The purpose of this essay was to narratively describe a moment in my life that has made

me the reader and writer I am today. I hope to communicate my skills through clarity,

confidence, and as well as my level of writing. I expect my essay to allow the reader to feel

emotional by including imagery and descriptions throughout my essay. By using the writing

process, it made writing and editing this essay very easy. I started out by thinking of ideas to

write about until the one I felt the most confident with a topic with many details. I planned on

writing this essay in the traditional format of introduction, a single body paragraph, and

conclusion. Obviously, that is not the way it turned out since the minimum word count

requirement was nine hundred words. I ended up changing most of the essay at the end. I

completely changed the introduction from a boring essay with no hook, to an introduction with

dialogue as the hook. My classmates' feedback and responses from group discussions helped me

with figuring out how to annotate text, in this case my own essay, to better understand what I am

doing. After reading “The Art of Eating Spaghetti” in class and annotating it as a group, it

assisted me with thinking of a topic and seeing how a literacy narrative essay is formatted.