Shitty First Draft: Literacy

Sean Demme

10.2.2012

English 1510

               My older sister is such a nerd. “Let me teach you to read.” she’d say and I wouldn’t ever let her. It started with the two solid lines and the dotted one down the middle on grayish white paper. I thought I could read and write like Shakespeare among toddlers. I came home from school and wrote a note to my dad about my new shirt and how I was excited about it. It wasn’t until he read the note that I found was no Shakespeare at all. I figured out why my teacher snickered when I wrote the same story in class. As it turns out, the word shirt is a very different word without the “R”.  

               I then took my sister’s offering of teaching me to read and write. I got better, slowly, and eventually I got to where I was proficient at reading only to find that I was now in elementary school and reading was sooooo boring. I stopped reading for a little, I hated it. This is what gave me my hunger to be a writer now. I stopped reading for pleasure until high school, I was a terrible reader. I read a couple of books on my own. Now I like reading – I’ve told myself that. I say that because I only “tell” myself that I like to read, I don’t read for pleasure still to this day. One thing I’d like to do is change that – actually get myself to read for pleasure, not just convince myself I do.