Brianna Douglas 

Instructor Camilleri 

ENG 160 

21 September, 2021 

Writing with a Purpose Means to Read with a Purpose? 

     What does it mean to want to read and write? Who likes to read and who likes to write? What is the importance of it and why do we even do those types of things? My godmother taught me both reading and writing. Throughout my lifetime I felt as if I didn’t like reading but I do like writing and so it shaped me to be a published writer out in the world today.  

     My godmother started teaching me how to read and write when I was 3 years old. I learned my ABC’s and how to spell certain words (that they now call those “cite words”) by the time I was 4 years old. I can still remember my godmother gripping on to my hand telling me that I need to hold the pencil in my right hand, use my pointer finger to support my hand when writing and to use my middle finger and thumb to support the grip of the pencil on the side, the other fingers just needed to bend behind and stay out the way. She held my hand, so it was glued onto the pencil and then we would begin to trace the letters that she previously drew with dash lines. After we finished tracing a letter, she would make me say it 3 times over and when we got to spelling words, I would have to trace the letters with my finger, then using a pencil and then say the word, and then repeat in that sequence for 3 times. By the time I was in pre-K I was top of my class and advanced. I took a gap year in school because long story short Kindergarten wasn’t mandatory and after attending a few classes the principal who had a past with my mom realized who she was. I was called out of class one day to go to the principal’s office and being the innocent dove, I was concerned I was in trouble, but my teacher put her hand on my shoulder and assured me I wasn’t. When I went to the office I heard my mom, godmother and assistant principal going back and forth. I was told soon after that I had to leave the school because I wasn’t fully registered, which meant I wasn’t a student. The lady wasn’t my teacher or my classmates who I saw as friends, I wouldn’t be going to the same school as the boy who I grew up with in my godmothers house so we couldn’t see each other till the school day was over. I got sad but because my godmother, I kept learning at home, disabled on the whole left side of her body, paralyzed, she still managed to make sure I learned. She taught me how to count and do math where I knew by the time, I got into first grade how to count by 5s, 10s, 20s. She would tell me to start counting at random times of the day as we went to do her chores. We would be going to a grocery store and as I leaned against her wheelchair and sat with her she would randomly nudge me and use her humor and go Brianna count by 5s and I’d start, “5, 10, 15…” when I would mess up, she would say again, or she would go Brianna spell bat, and I’d go “B A T” and she would come up with another word sometimes it was one that rhymed like “cat” and others it was one in a category, like animals, and she’d say, “spell bird” and I would go “B I R D” and if I messed up she used to tell me sound it out, “ba ba ba ba irrrrrrrrr dddddd”. When I entered first grade, I was again advanced and top of my class, my elementary school, P.S.69 (now P.S.69 Journey Prep), wanted to make me skip a grade. My mom decided to tell them no I needed friends my age and to grow with those who I already knew, I am grateful she did that.   

     As I got older and continued to go through this in life, my godmother started trying to force me to read more. I found out it was because of her hectic, chaotic, yet endearing and overcoming past that made her like reading. She liked to read for the fact it helped her feel like she was in a different world, and she was imaginative and creative. What I don’t think she realized though is how much her forcing me to read made me feel further and further from the slightest bit of enjoyment of the task. It didn’t give me that same excitement as her because she wasn’t forced, it came to her naturally, with her interests. By the time I was in middle school she was trying to force me to read Edgar Allen Poe. Every day when I finished my normal homework, she would make me read 30 minutes of his book, A Dream within a Dream. What she also failed to realize was that because of my non-existing knowledge of old English I couldn’t really grasp what the book was saying, it would bore me to the point where after I got to 10 minutes, I fell asleep on her leather, reclining sofas. It just made me feel comforted, when I was younger, I took my naps to classical music on them, she said classical music enforced reading, critical thinking, and math skills in kids. She would scream at me every time as I repeatedly I told her I don’t want to read> She would just tell me that reading is important and I must do it. She would tell me to start where I left off and to continue, so I would. I was very compliant now that I look back on it, never going and questioning what I was being told, yet then again that’s what I was also taught to do. I repeated this for 3 years of my life, using different books(I also read on the weekends).   

     I got into a humanities class in 7th grade, this ended up being one of my favorite classes. In this class we wrote and discussed a lot. I started to like what I was writing about and so I wrote more and more. Later in the 8th grade I had the same class, with the same teacher and she told me about a poetry contest, she thought I should give it a try. I told her, “What do I write about” and she simply told me, “Whatever you want that will answer the prompt of the contest”. She gave me the slip of paper with the task and sent me on my way. I started to write more and more and realized I started looking like those people in movies, “Bigger Fatter Liar”, and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”, the kids would spend hours writing and just ball up papers and throw them around. I couldn’t think of anything to write about. The next day we read a poem in class, and I realized that’s it! That’s what I’m going to write about, the poem I ended up writing was about how we live in a dystopian society with all these rules meant to make us look perfect like those utopian ones you read about or see on TV. The truth is though that no society is even a utopian one because even they have flaws, they’re just harder to pinpoint out when you’re living through them. After this I won and I was happy to have won, I was being published and I represented my school as 1 of the two winners of the contest. I got the book my poem was published in and realized my name was misspelled, my last name. They were giving out hundreds of copies, it was too late for them to fix it, but I was still happy with the simple fact that this is one of my achievements, being a writer, being published, and not only that, but at a young age. I also performed my poem in front of an audience in a Manhattan building as this was an event and there was several people there eating and sharing their love for poetry. Then I realized that it wasn’t as bad as I thought, I liked writing and all of that writing and throwing out the papers balled up and time spent was worth it. I later realized that all that reading that I did because of my godmother and her persistence and determination is what caused me to be great, she taught me what I knew.  

     My godmother was able to teach me reading, reading taught me how to write and by writing I have been able to express myself. I found that it’s not that I don’t like reading, it’s just I was never interested in that kind of reading. Being forced to read you don’t realize the little things, but in fact everyone like me reads a lot, we even read while we write. People read in order to learn, you can learn about yourself such as your interests and what they mean or do for you, or (even like me with Edgar Allen Poe), your uninterests and why that is. “Reading and writing go hand in hand” as Sylvia Melvin put it, all people who read and write for enjoyment and not for task completion should be able to like it. We read and write with one another to communicate, to tell a story or moment in time. It’s important because as humans it brings us together and gives us connections and bonds over things so we can get the human interaction/bonding moment(s) that everybody might want. I currently have published works such as in the poetry book I mentioned, and some collaborative works in a program called CUP (the Center for Urban Pedagogy) where I was published in a newspaper, a website, and a magazine. Even though I like writing, I don’t aspire to be a writer or researcher, but at least I feel good knowing I’m comfortable in doing it and in a way that makes me proud of myself.