Blog 17 - What I Have So Far

When I thought about the subject matter for my personal essay, skateboarding was the first thing that came to mind. Skateboarding is a huge part of my life and affects a lot of the other facets of my personality. It affects the music I listen to, a bunch of other things as well as how I view the rest of the world. It also affects how the rest of the world views me. The essay was basically meant to be about the writer, and you can learn a lot about me based on my skating; especially when it is compared and contrasted with my past and present self. Skateboarding shaves off a little bit of the fear factor we’re all born with. As I grew through my skating, I grew as a person mentally and physically. I decided to use this as my focus. From my initial paragraph I decided what I would focus the whole essay on. I didn't want what I had to say to come out in a blunt fashion either, so I had to be careful and use metaphors and other literary devices.
I usually type in my room, on my bed. Sometime with the television on and something with no real substance playing…like a skate video. Either that or a movie I’ve seen a billion times already and know like the back of my hand. Whatever it is, I want something playing that I am not going to focus on entirely. My focus would be split between my typing and the action going on the screen in front of me. If I find that my focus is wavering against my writing, I turn off the television and focus completely on my writing. I let it pour from my fingertips and onto the page erratically. Every now and then I’ll get the red squiggly line of shame underneath misspelled words and hit F7 to correct them. More times then not, it was slang not featured in the Microsoft Word Dictionary.
As this essay came to fruition, I had to make sure I was using tense correctly due to the fact that the essay was in the past, but with one event taking place farther back in the past than the other. I also had to be careful with terminology that a large audience not familiar with skateboarding would be able to understand. The fact that the paper dealt with skateboarding meant I had to be careful where I tread and betray my use of terms I am very much familiar with. Words like “kickflip” and “360 Flip” were changed to “the board flipped over twice, returning to its original arrangement” and “the board rotated a full three hundred and sixty degrees” respectively. Most of my edits were in reference to this cryptic dialog. It was really hard trying to convey something I was so familiar with to and audience that didn’t share the same acquaintance to skateboarding that I had had for years.