Erick Rutt

Hallie Bryant

R_C 1000 Expository Writing

During the earliest years of my life my family didn’t have many books around our house so

whenever I was at home, I wasn’t given the chance to observe any books and get a feel for what

they were. Things were different when I went off to pre-school the classrooms always had plenty

of books for me to interact with. Most of the books were filled with pictures and very few words

but I was still intrigued. The classroom bookshelf was in a corner of the room away from

everything else so during nap time I would lay by the bookshelf and look through the books

instead of taking my nap.

My family and friends didn’t read very often so they didn’t give me a push into reading but if I

ever had the desire to have a certain book my parents were always happy to get me the book I

wanted because they saw It as a good thing for me to try and develop my skills with.

During my first few years of elementary school, I was still into books that had more to do with

pictures rather than words, so I had a lot of interest in graphic novels. From kindergarten to third

grade, I would always choose a graphic novel as my book during silent reading time and my

teachers were never a fan of this. It wasn’t until fourth grade that I had no choice but to pick a
book that wasn’t a graphic novel because the teacher I had that year did not like graphic novels

nor did she want them in her classroom. At some point during fourth grade, my teacher would

take 30-45 minutes to read to us every day. I remember the first book she read to use was called

“School of fear” It was about a group of kids who went to school and instead of doing normal

things that people would do in school they would have to face their biggest fears head-on by the

end of the school year. I don’t remember many details outside of that, but I remembered always

being excited for my teacher to read to us because the book fascinated me. School of fear is a

series so after we got through the first book, I wanted to see what happened next. I had my

parents take me to Barnes and Noble so I could get the books that came next in the series. For a

long time, School of fear was the only thing I was reading in and out of school.

After elementary school, the time that I spent reading declined some, but I was still reading from

time to time. Halfway through middle school is when writing started to pick up for me. I didn’t

do much of it in elementary school, so I was not the best at it. The end of 7th grade is when any

enjoyment I had for reading really went downhill. My English class was reading “Ender’s game”

and we would have to write about what we read every night. Almost everyone in my class

enjoyed the book while I was one of the few people who didn’t care for the book. I was never a

fan of being told what I had to read and writing about a book I had little to no interest in Ender’s

Game, to begin with, and writing about it every night really brought the enjoyment down for me.

High School is where any care for reading and writing I had left was all thrown away. From

freshman year all the way up to my senior year in every English class I had we were assigned
multiple books throughout each semester, and I dreaded the thought of reading anything. My

least favorite novel that I read during high school was “Macbeth” I dreaded the thought of this

book every day because It’s what our entire class period would revolve around. I despised how

the novel was worded because I felt like I was trying too hard to get a simple message from a

book. Reading and writing were now some of the things that I wanted nothing to do with. From

high school to where I am now, nothing has changed. I don’t do much reading on my own time,

and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The enjoyment I had reading as a child disappeared

over the years and now is something I don’t know I can enjoy anymore