My Journey With Language: A University Essay
Happy weekend! And happy birthday month to my fellow Cancerians!
The paper you are about to read is a reflective essay I had to write for my English literature class. It is about my personal history with language. I made it take the form of a journey, as I have done many times with my reflective writing on this blog. I was so proud of the result I got for it, as this was the first university essay I've done that didn't have to follow the conventional structure of an academic essay. Instead, it could be done in a more personal style with a subject of our choice, giving us a chance to make our voices heard in the world of academia.
The paper you are about to read is a reflective essay I had to write for my English literature class. It is about my personal history with language. I made it take the form of a journey, as I have done many times with my reflective writing on this blog. I was so proud of the result I got for it, as this was the first university essay I've done that didn't have to follow the conventional structure of an academic essay. Instead, it could be done in a more personal style with a subject of our choice, giving us a chance to make our voices heard in the world of academia.
I certainly hope you enjoy it. Any and all comments and criticisms are welcome in the comments!
From journaling to blogging: My journey with language
Among
the greatest things in my room is my stack of fifteen journals. Some of them are the size of composition
notebooks, while others are the size of school exercise books. Some have personalized covers, and others
have the pastel covers from Typo that I would not dare to spoil. Some journals are filled with magazine
clippings, newspaper articles, collages, and scrapbook designs, some are packed
with short stories, poems, and ideas for novels that I have jotted down over
the years, and others contain the most intimate details about my life: My innermost thoughts and feelings, my
hardships and tribulations, and my relationships and dreams. If I had to pinpoint a moment in my life when
I first realised how powerful language could be if I learned to manipulate it skilfully,
I would pin it to the moment I started journaling.
My journaling
started when I was ten-years-old. It was
a requirement for us in school to keep a journal. We were given total control over what we wanted
to write about, and what form the journal could take. As ten-year-old school girls on the cusp of
writing our first set of exams, journaling would help us in ways we did not yet
understand. We had never before been
asked to interrogate and interpret texts in a formal setting such as an exam,
so journaling and making our thoughts visible before our eyes helped us form
more concrete thoughts that could be edited and made to be concise. Journaling assisted in making English a
tangible object for us to manipulate and mould however we wanted to in order to
portray our sense of understanding of the world around us, to engage and
grapple with our thought patterns, and to communicate our interpretations of
texts, media, drawings, and poems in the exams.
This was an incredibly powerful feeling to hold language in your hands,
and have your inner workings of your mind compiled into a document that was
entirely your own. To me, language became
a door to another world that I could open and close as I pleased, constructing
my own reality, and exploring the deepest parts of myself that had never been
unlocked before as my mind raced with my hand to make it onto the blank page.
The
one restriction to my journaling was the form it took. As stated previously, the journals were free
to be written in our own style and form, such as a letter, dialogue, poem,
prose, or cartoon. However, the types of
books I was reading at that stage of my language journey were the likes of
Jacqueline Wilson and Meg Cabot, which featured pre-pubescent teenage girls writing
in their journals in the form of “Dear diary” and ending with “Love,
Emily.” Because these authors were
published novelists, and because this was the only form of journaling I had
been exposed to through literature, it appeared to be that this was the way I
had to write in order to appear professional, and be taken seriously in my
writing. That is a lot of responsibility
for a ten-year-old to manage, but I had never known any other way to journal
other than the ways presented in the books I was reading at the time. I was also not comfortable enough in my manipulation
of language, and did not have faith in my creative abilities with language, to include
my own personal style in my journals. As
a result, my journal entries from when I was ten-years-old all appear to be carbon
copies of the journal entries of the characters from the books I was
reading.
This
frustrates me deeply, because I plan on majoring in English literature, and
when I look back on my journey with language, I cannot accurately analyse my
own writing. I cannot track my own
progress with my writing styles because they exist so heavily on external
influences that they end up feeling like they are not my own. I accept that I cannot do anything to change
this looking back, but it is still frustrating that I will never be able to
call my writing and the language I spoke as a ten-year old my own, because I
was so insecure in my own language usage and creativity to the point that I had
to rely on the work of others. Because
of this, I also never developed my own unique style of speaking and expressing
myself verbally through language. I
borrowed and copied phrases from other people’s conversations and dialects, and
incorporated them into my daily speech.
Today, I do not consider this to be my own unique style because, once
again, it was a blend of everything that ultimately was not me. Nothing that I said, nor the style that I
said it in, came from myself and my interpretation of the world. My relationship
with language grew weaker as I struggled to construct my own identity that I
was proud and confident of. This lack of
personal identity that I had failed to construct through language became more
apparent to me as I started high school.
Not
only did I have to make the transition from primary school to high school, I
also had to make the transition from public school to private school. In public school, my friends and I spoke in
loud voices. We shouted to each other
across the field, made jokes in Afrikaans, and laughed without inhibition. Language did not restrict us in any way. Instead, it freed us, allowing us to express
ourselves, form friendship circles and debating groups, and explore and
question the world around us by giving us the confidence to speak about our
feelings, and share and debate in a safe environment. In private school, however, I felt restricted
by language. Language was used to
police, enforce, and keep us grounded.
We were rarely allowed to express our opinions in the schooling environment,
and were not allowed to make any form of announcement, demonstration, or
displays unless they had been approved, censored, and edited by an
authoritarian member. This restricted us
to saying only what the school wanted us to say, and only hearing what they
wanted us to hear. I felt the door that
language had opened up for me as a young girl slowly start to close. As a result, I only began to see the world
from within the confinements of private school.
Even when I was not in school, I would be making assumptions,
judgements, and observations based on how I had been entrenched to do in
school. It was not until I started
interacting with my public school friends again that I realised how much
language had changed and influenced the way I behaved, spoke, and viewed the
world. I realised I had come full circle
from where I was when I was ten years old, and that nothing I was doing through
language had ever come from my own.
Instead, I was speaking the way others taught me to speak, writing the
way others told me to write, and making observations the way my school had
taught me to do. I had become like the
collages I made in my journals: A little bit of everything else, but not entirely
me. I also realised that, like the
journaling project, language was not empowering me in the way I hoped it
would. I knew that language could be a
powerful tool if I learned to manipulate it, as I said in the beginning, but I
had not managed to do so successfully. I
thought that journaling would help me in that process, but that failed in
helping me establish my unique identity through language. Moving from public school to private school
had further pushed this problem to the point that I felt powerless in my own
manipulation of language.
I
decided to start a blog when I was sixteen-years-old. I had been wanting to start blogging before,
but due to my writing and language manipulation insecurities that stemmed from
primary school, I did not feel confident enough. However, when it came time for me to choose
my subjects I wanted to study to Matric, and prepare my way for deciding my
majors in university, I realised I needed to take ownership of my writing, and
become the enlightened, skilled literature student I knew I could be. I knew how to analyse poetry, answer
comprehensions, and explain figures of speech in a regurgitating manner so that
I could get the marks I needed to get in order to do well in my exams, because
this was what the institution I was in wanted to hear. I knew how to please them, because it did not
require any analysis on my part. It only
required telling them what other sources said was true about the piece of
literature, and why this was the correct interpretation of the piece. However, my creative writing suffered in that
process. Creative writing was an
exercise where my own creative flair could be made known, but two problems
presented themselves: The first being
that even though a level of creativity was allowed, it was still within the
restrictions that language within the school environment placed on me. The second problem was that I fell victim to
clichés, overused metaphors, and variations of similar plot lines, because I
had not established my own voice, identity, and confidence through writing and
language. My creative writing suffered
further, and I truly believed that I had no creative writing skills
whatsoever. I had virtually no writing
identity outside of academia. I knew I
needed to establish my identity through language sooner than later, and now was
the time to do it. Now was the time to find
my unique voice through writing, and the way I decided to do so was by
blogging.
Blogging
seemed like an appropriate place to find my voice through creative writing and
language manipulation because I was an anonymous person on the internet amongst
thousands of bloggers. I could write and
express myself without anyone limiting my content, and I could choose whatever
I wanted to focus on without being given a specific topic. For the first time since starting my academic
journey through language, I finally felt my own unique road start to pave. I felt my own journey with language begin as
I was without restrictions and inhibitions, and settled into my own literary
refuge to write and express myself at my will.
I finally felt empowered through language, and felt my creativity
showcase itself like never before. As my
blog content became more personal, and as my audience worldwide grew, my
confidence in my abilities to manipulate language increased, and I became even
more excited at the prospect of studying English literature at university.
Blogging
was the best decision for me considering the space that I was in in my journey
with language. Blogging assisted me in
increasing my confidence in my abilities to express myself through creative
writing, and helped me in constructing logical, coherent arguments. If I had remained complacent with my writing
abilities, and not made an effort to exert myself as a unique individual
through my blog, my language manipulation abilities and creative writing skills
would have remained stagnant. I also
would not have been as excited as I was to become an English literature major
in university, because my writing abilities and relationship with language
would not have been as strong as they could have been.
Reflecting
on the journey I have walked with language fills me with pride and hope. I am proud of myself for committing to
forging a stronger relationship with language, and for realising that my own
unique identity was necessary for me to construct more coherent arguments, to
improve my creative writing skills, to learn to strengthen my voice, and to
value and express my own opinions, beliefs, and story-telling abilities. I am realizing more and more every day that my
relationship with language has also helped me forge international connections
by people connecting with me through the written word, and being inspired by my
writing. It gives me immense hope for
the future, because my blog is expanding at an unprecedented rate. My blog has opened up so many more doors than
I ever could have opened myself, and has helped me dream bigger than the
confinements of school allowed me to.
Language
has not only opened my mind, but the world for me too. Through strengthening my relationship with
language, and having faith in my writing abilities and language manipulation, I
have gained a confidence and passion for language that I could not have
anticipated as a ten-year-old school struggling to find herself in her
journal. Seeing the stack of journals in
my room reminds me that while this journey with language has been a fulfilling
and enlightening one, I have a duty to continue on the road I paved for myself,
and keep building on the identity I have found through language.
XO
Thanks for sharing it
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Hey there!
DeleteWow, thank you so much for your kind words! Your encouragement and support is what motivates me to continue writing. Thank you again!
P.S. What are all those links for? I took a look at them, but didn't understand them.