Hamilton 1

Clay Hamilton
Comp 101
Professor Salyers
25 August 2014
Timeline
My first memories of reading are from first grade. I remember always having awful
handwriting. We had to go through those books and copy your abcs and I could never follow
the lines. My letters never looked like the ones in the book. I always hated whenever we had to
do any writing because of my awful handwriting. Sometimes I would go back through my writ-
ing and I would not even be able to read what I had written earlier. However, I loved to read.
Anytime that we would read during class, I would volunteer because that was the one thing that I
was really good at.
The first series of books that I enjoyed reading was The Boxcar Children. They were my
favorite books as a kid. I read every single one that my tiny schools library had. Then came the
first paper that I ever had to write. I remember it like yesterday. I was in third grade; Mrs. Rob-
erts class. We had to choose an animal and write a one page paper on that animal. I choose the
grizzly bear. Back in third grade that page paper was terrible. I thought I was going to die when
I started writing it. There was no way that I could write a one page paper, but now when I look
back I think of how ridiculous that was. A one page paper is short now.
After that paper my next standout memory of reading was the book Eragon. It is still one
of my favorite books today. I remember sitting in study hall with my friends and we would all
Hamilton 2

try to guess what would happen in the next book to come out. I hated waiting for the next book
in the trilogy to come out. And then when the third book came out he announced that he turned
it into a cycle. I was so mad. How could the author do this to me? I had waited three years for
the third book to come out and then he is going to make me wait another three to read the con-
clusion to all the books. That was one of the worst news that I have ever received about a book.
I just could not believe that he would do that to me. But soon it would not even matter. I started
high school.
Once high school started I realized what papers actually were. Or so I thought. Teachers
started to assign two or three page papers and I thought it was the end of the world. How was I
supposed to have time to write such long papers. Then my junior year came around. I thought
man this year will be easy. I had gotten used to writing a two or three page paper once a month.
Then my English teacher said those dreaded words. Class this quarter we are going to do a ten
to fifteen page research paper. You can choose what you write the paper on but it must be on a
topic before 1980s. I went into anaphylactic shock. Not really, but that is the feeling that came
over me. Then come to find out writing a paper that long is not too bad. Once I started my re-
search it was harder to narrow it down to less pages because of all the interesting facts I wanted
to include in the paper. I got it done though and then wrote another research paper my senior
year. Now I am writing papers for my Composition 101 class and other classes at Gardner-
Webb University.