Autobiographical Essay #4: Talking at Two

I don’t remember much of my early years, but according to my mother I was a very interesting toddler when it came to speaking. I apparently chose to speak in my own wonky language until the age of two when I could speak in complete sentences. My mother used to always tell me, I was unlike other children in the sense that other children would say single words as they began to learn to speak, such as “cat” or “ball,” but I waited until I could clearly ask, “May I have the ball?”

In retrospect I can see that this system of waiting until I learn the entirety of something has followed me throughout my life. While other students learned lessons, such as a mathematics problem or essay structure, part by part, I absorbed everything until I was sure I could perform the lesson properly. Seeing as to perform mathematics properly you must understand all parts individually prior to a proper completion, I am still not very good at math today. However, essay writing always seemed more fluid to me: there was room for error and revision. Still it was not until I was in my freshman composition class in college that I truly comprehended the essay concept and then I flourished. While my system worked for me in some aspects of my study, it equally did not in others.

It wasn’t until my sophomore year in high school, when I was taking my first psychology class that my mother told me about my insistence on complete sentences as a child. I was quiet pleased when I heard about this; it was cool to think that I waited to speak until I could be properly understood, and it gave my some insight to my dilemma of essay writing at the time. It was helpful to realize that though I didn’t understand the individual purpose for the parts of the essay structure, i.e. introduction, body, and concluding paragraphs, by themselves once I looked at the essay structure as a whole it would click. It did. Once I saw the introduction as not only a paragraph, but a comment for what was to come in the body and as assistance to the conclusion, essay writing became all the more easier. I just had to put purpose behind what I was writing, just like I had to put purpose behind what I was saying as a child.