Well, what do I want to learn?

Well, to be honest, I am taking English 150 because it’s a GE and if I want a little piece of paper at the end of all this that says my education is worth something, then I guess I have to take this class. If only I’d have passed my English AP test in high school. I know it sounds like a bad attitude and that assumption is probably right, but when it comes down to it, I do like to study English. It’s more the grammar nonsense that I always hated in high school. I probably should have paid better attention then I’d at least be able to speak properly. Writing papers, I don’t mind it at all. In fact, I enjoy it. I do my best writing at about 10:00 pm. That is when things just flow out onto the paper. It usually has to be the night before it is do as well. That’s really when I excel in writing.

I guess that might be one thing I would like to learn during the course of this semester, to learn to write a well-written paper at a time other than the night before it is due. That is what I am trying to do right now. I can only hope it works. I like the art of writing and want to improve my skills at it. I want to be able to manipulate a sentence in a way that it does not come off as just plain and ordinary. This, like most things, comes through practice. That’s where I run into a problem. Writing to me sometimes just feels like busywork and I stop caring about what I am writing. Passion is an important aspect of writing and I have been able to learn that already this semester.

In high school I thought I spoke English fairly well. I could talk to an adult and never really had struggle for words. Then this thing called a mission happened. I went to Paraguay where they speak two languages: Spanish and Guarani. Some spoke only Spanish, more spoke only Guarani, but most spoke a mixture of the two. If you were on the border of Brazil then they would throw Portuguese into the mix just because they could. Well here I am a year off my mission and I still have their custom of just mixing the languages together. One would think that by now I should be able to speak, but I cant. I constantly find myself looking for the right words and screwing up my grammar as I speak. This semester I want to get a better hold of the English language in both written and spoken form.

Many times when I write, I find myself beating around the bush. In everyday life, I’m not like that at all. Just about everyone I know will tell you that I am pretty straight forward and like to tell it how it is. I want to learn to become more precise in my writing. I want to be able to express my ideas more clearly and completely without having to go to Canada and back to do so. Sometime being verbose is a good thing, other times its not. For those times that it isn’t, I want to be to the point while being able to fully express my views and opinions.

These are just a few of the things that I would like to learn this wonderful semester in English 150.