Very early on in my awareness of life, there is a distinct memory of a British reading program called the Oxford Reading Tree. This was a wonderful system (which my mother sold in a garage sale . . . naturally) designed to build on itself, beginning with basic words and progressing through more than 14 levels to relatively advanced reading and comprehension skills. Between this system and the fact that my parents have read to me as long as I can remember (there’s even home-video evidence of this), I’m quite sure that reading has been a big part of my life from the dawn of my consciousness.

I clearly remember being heavily into books from the age of 6, at which point my school in England had its own system of moving young readers through various levels of books, the first one being Fat Pig’s Birthday (a title which in this day and age is decidedly politically incorrect, but since this was the early 90s, we’ll let it slide). I remember moving on to Jane and the Big Yellow Machine, which I pronounced Mah-Chyne (only once), and then things like Percy Green House and Jennifer Yellow House. There were even green- and yellow-roofed houses quite close to the school, so a field trip to visit them was always a treat.

The first “young adult” book I remember reading was The Animals of Farthing Wood by Colin Dann, a fantastic book, the first in a series of six, which was later made into a cartoon and exploded into a British cultural phenomenon that entailed clothing, magazines, and every child trinket you can imagine. When we moved to America in 1995 and I asked my 4th grade teacher if this was a book the entire class might enjoy, she took it for a day, had it “analyzed,” and came back to me saying there was no way, since it was written to a 9th grade reading level minimum. This was the beginning of many instances when I would be made painfully aware of the education differences between Great Britain and America. The average American newspaper is written to an 8th grade reading level, since the assumption is that that’s the average level of education completion in this country. Compare this statistic to the average newspapers in England which are written to a college reading level, and we begin to see a problem. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was originally called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, but when it hit the American market it was decided that U.S. children wouldn’t know what a philosopher was, and so the title had to be changed.

The realization that my early reading education was more advanced than my American peers’ was both concerning and motivating. It was at this point that I decided that I must not allow myself (an overly anxious 9 year old) to coast on what was expected of my age group; I must use my foundation as an advantage to do well in reading and writing. In every writing assignment I received that first year in America, I would write and re-write my responses, worrying over every detail. I remember one assignment where we had to write poems about our fears, and I wrote two about storms and dinosaurs which I could still recite today due to the countless times I revised them both. They’re actually pretty good!

Despite enjoying the poetry assignment, I was never particularly fond of creative or personal writing. I made dozens of attempts at keeping diaries and journals, but after a day or two I would be so bored of reliving my daily experiences that the experiment would be abandoned. I don’t like talking about myself, and I found journal-keeping to be a decidedly self-centered activity. I much preferred writing things like reports and essays. I remember an essay assignment for a history class in which I had to choose a topic unfamiliar to me and write a few pages on the history of that topic. I chose two different things: Afghan Hounds, and the explosion at Chernobyl, and I wrote at least 5 pages on each. This was in 6th grade.

As I moved into middle and high school, I discovered the delightful subject known as literature. Now this was something I found pretty darn cool; not only did you actually get to read in class, you HAD to! And then, you had to write about what you’d read!!! I was sure they’d created this setup as a sort of comic relief, since something so thoroughly enjoyable couldn’t possibly be part of school. Luckily for me, it was real, respected, and something you could continue even after high school. It was during my high school years that I distinctly remember learning things like grammar rules, sentence structure, how to analyze a piece of literature, and how to proofread. I suppose it was at this point that I really learned how to write; not the physical act of forming letters, but the art of crafting words into phrases that were coherent and had deeper meaning that the words on the surface.

When I went to college I wanted to be a vet, so I spent my first year as a biology major. I quickly decided that I didn’t want to spend the next 10 years in college (hahahaha, says the woman with a plan for a PhD), so I switched to English since it was “easy” for me and I enjoyed it. Makes sense, I suppose, since everyone you ever meet tells you to do the things that you love so you never have to actually work a day in your life. Over the next few years I learned to further refine my writing style and to allow myself to write in a way that expressed who I was, even if it was technically creative writing. It took a while for me to realize that it was ok to have my own distinct style (something desirable, even), and to loosen up in my writing. Humor is a plus in any sort of writing, even formal assignments.

In the last couple years of my undergraduate, the paper assignments gradually got longer, until they reached required lengths of 15 to 20 pages. The first time I saw this on the syllabus, I about died. It’s been interesting to observe my reactions over the past couple months, as now a paper of that length is a relief, not a major panic-inducer. I suppose if and when I write a thesis and/or dissertation I’ll freak out at first, but hopefully I’ll get through it. It’s all part of the learning process. I hope I never fully finish learning how to write.