My Monkey-Free Evolution

I come from a family of readers. That is, although most everybody’s family has read at some point in their lifetime, mine has happened to make a hobby out of it. Following in my sisters’ footsteps, I started reading at the ripe old age of three, and would often stay up late in bed to finish books I had started earlier and could not put down. As I grew older, the literary worlds of Phillip Pullman and Brian Jacques fascinated me, those of Roald Dahl and P.G. Wodehouse made me roar with laughter, and, to be perfectly honest, Little Women bored me senseless. As my age spiraled ever so higher, unfortunately, so did my awareness of the lack of “coolness” that such a hobby brings. For the past several years, my taste in books has been mostly limited to historical fiction and nonfiction about war (authors such as Jeff Shaara and Tim O’Brien) and older detective novels (authors like Donald Hamilton, Adam Hall, and Mickey Spillane). Like any normal person, I hate being bored when I read, and I believe that only so much satisfaction can be derived through the reading of the “elevated style” of works by authors such as Dickens and Hawthorne.


Because I hate reading boring material, I strive to make my writing interesting. In other words, I won’t write it if I can’t enjoyably read it. Of course, when one must meet certain requirements this is not always a plausible standard; I have yet to read or write an enjoyable research paper. As an activity, writing is not very enjoyable for me; I’d rather be up and about than sitting at a computer chair racking my brain for something clever to put down. My top writing achievements would, of course, include the (too) many research papers I’ve written and have yet to write. For me, writing those papers is more like running a marathon than it is like creating a work of art; it’s almost a physical pride in my ability to coherently assemble such massive amounts of information. My writing strengths include my pretty substantial vocabulary and decent sense of humor, while some of my weaknesses are my tendency to ramble off-topic, speak in run-on sentences, and to use parentheses too often. What I have read over my lifetime has influenced the way that I will write for the rest of it, and every time I read a new book I find something that I would like to add to or subtract from my own style. It’s a work in progress. (426)