Activity One: Linguistic History

Thinking back to my childhood and my writing assignments in school I feel that most of them started with the student having more freedom in elementary to the teacher picking topics and writing material in high school. In elementary school the writing seemed to be aimed toward us creating stories and topics were more on what the student wanted. As in high-school the writing was more on research a specific topic or on poems that were picked out by the teacher. I feel that the writing in both high-school and grade school the writing had a purpose and that purpose was to simple get better at writing and gain more knowledge about a given topic. In addition in both high school and elementary the focus seem to be on proper grammar use and sentence structure. One paper that I found most difficult was a group paper that I had to write on a history topic because I really am uninterested in an historical event. Also hard to me because it had to a total of 8 pages and after awhile I felt as though I was just rambling to get to the next page. As far as reading goes I for one do as little as I can or as much as I need to to get to the need number of pages. The only reading that I do for fun would have to be health magazines. If I had to pick write a paper or read a book I would definitely pick writing the paper. Although I do like to write what is on my mind I never have kept a diary or come up with poems of my own. Like most people in today's world I do commonly use technology to text message and e-mail. Thinking on how people use to speak to me as I was growing up it tended to very for group to group. Another words my family spoke one way, friends another, and teachers another. I can say my friends used more slang, were as my family used older terms sometimes leaving me ask what they meant. As far as me I never truly spoke any other language then English even though I did take some French classes in high-school I never became fluent in it. This is what I can gather from my childhood writing experiences.

In general, I feel that all writing has a specific purpose and some outline or rules that a writer must follow, even if that means following no rules at all. However, I do feel that essays/ assignments do differ from other writings in that they are used for different reasons in certain situations. For example you wouldn't write a essay to your poetry teacher or you wouldn't submit an diary to a job that you wish to obtain. So I guess you could say that I feel each writing assignment is geared toward a specific audience. Some of writing is done for self purposes, job purposes, and school purposes. In my eyes it is often times the audience that you are writing to that decides what type of writing style you will use. Essay and assignments to are often used for more information based reasons rather then a poem, which tends to be more personal based. Basically, in my viewpoint all writing has a purpose, but it is the audience that decides what direction the writing will go.