A Writer is a Reader Foremost

 Maria gets back from her long day at school, determined to make tonight productive and get a headstart on her reading assignment of three chapters. This first week back at school has offered a clean, new slate for her to do her best and maintain her focus to get good grades. She refills her water bottle and grabs a snack from her pantry and heads upstairs to begin her mission. When she enters her room, she is met with the mess she had left that morning in a rush to get to class on time. Her desk is cluttered with makeup products and brushes that she hastily used and left, thinking, "I'll pick them up when I get back." Clothes are scattered across the floor from discarded outfits she decided didn't look good for today. The overwhelming condition was too distracting to put off for later. She decides to quickly put everything away and tidy up to have a productive environment. Finally, she can sit down and get started on her reading! She puts on her headphones, opens the textbook up, and pulls out a notebook and writing supplies for notes and annotations. The first couple of pages go great, she actively reads and notes down important information to study later. Then, a sudden aroma stops her in her tracks. The familiar smell of freshly cooked rice, simmering carne asada, and warming tortillas entered her room from the kitchen directly below her. Her parents have been yelling at her to come down to eat dinner, and she just realized this after taking off her headphones blaring study music. A quick break to refuel will do her good! She comes down and talks to her parents for half an hour about how their days went and their plans for the weekend. After she finished eating and washed the dishes, she heads upstairs to her room to continue. Before she continues, however, she notices a bunch of notifications on her phone that vary from Snapchat snaps and messages, new posts from people she follows on Instagram, and TikToks sent by friends. She looks through these and finds herself spiraling down the rabbit hole of the addicting algorithm these social media apps geniously constructed to keep their viewers on. By the time she realizes this, an hour has already passed! She turns her phone off and hurriedly continues reading in order to make up for lost time, barely annotating anymore and not even fully understanding what was going on anymore in the book. By the time she finishes, she is mentally exhausted and ends up having to reread the last section. 

Some reading strategies I definitely need to work on are staying focused and getting the task at hand completed before anything else. Also, depending on the deadline for the reading assignment, spacing it out and reading it in sections would help with better comprehension and retention of the information. Although I enjoy doing my homework in my room with my desk, finding new study spaces around campus or other public spaces could further motivate me to stay focused.  

Although to a much less extreme extent, I related to Benjamin Percy's feeling of overwhelming expectation of needing to be well-read during my senior year of high school. I signed up for AP Literature, thinking it would be the same process and format as all of the other AP and pre-AP classes I took throughout high school. However, on the first day, my teacher announced that this class and exam in May would be the ultimate demonstration of how many classic works and novels we had read outside of class. I personally didn't really enjoy reading and only did for an English class, so I had nothing to flaunt. Thankfully, he accommodated those in the same boat as me and assigned extremely helpful papers of in-depth analysis for a novel of our choice to help utilize during the exam. These in-depth analyses helped me look out for specific aspects of the novel I read and made me an "expert" on it for the free-response section of the exam. In the same way, it can be seen that Percy decides to read novels more actively and analyzes the writing styles and rhetoric of famous authors to become a better writer himself. This slow-reading is a tactic I hope to utilize as well throughout this course through paying close attention to the rhetorical choices made in the assigned essays and how I can reflect that in my own essays and papers to become a better writer.