I hate writing essays. It’s nothing personal against them. Simply the fact that every time I have had to write an essay it leads to nothing but stress-induced breakdowns and staying up late. I once had to write an essay on smoking and the health risks involved in doing so. By having to stay up late and forcing my self to write this essay I was inspired almost to want to smoke. Another essay I have written was about Religion and if I could change one Church law what would it be. I wrote about how gay marriage should be legalized and I got an A from Sister Jane, although she added that the church disagrees. Then she assigned us an essay debating one law we wish we could change. I argued that marijuana should be legalized and compared the effects of marijuana to the effects of drinking alcohol. The most commonly used essays in school are the ones that come in the beginning of the school year. Usually the essay is called, “What I did with my summer vacation”. I hate that essay a lot. While I love summer and I always have a great time, I do not want to have to write an essay describing every waking moment of my summer. First of all, that is way too much to write about. Second of all some things are better left out of the public’s hands and definitely out of the school’s hands. Writing essays about my summer vacation also just makes me miss summer that much more, and because of the disdain I feel about being in school having to write the essay stresses me out even more. I do believe that essays were invented simply to waste students’ time and to torture them to the fullest extent without going to jail.
While I have to admit that some essay topics have been somewhat decent, that does not mean that I enjoyed them anymore than a bad topic. For example, I want to be a criminal psychiatrist because the only things that I really understand are criminals and the human mind. One time we got to write an essay about what we wanted to be when we got out of college and why we wanted to do that job. Another enjoyable topic was an essay on a mobster of our choice. While the rest of my uneducated classmates fought over Al Capone, the only Mobster they know of, I chose Bugsy Siegel. Bugsy is the man responsible for Las Vegas being founded. He had the idea of the Flamingo Hotel out in Las Vegas which sparked the rest of the casinos, hotels, clubs, and resorts out in the middle of the desert. Another essay was on an important figure of World War Two. Once again my classmates showed limited knowledge on the topic and fought over Adolf Hitler. I instead took the approach of Ilse Koch “The B**** of Buchenwald”. She was the wife of an S.S. officer. She started out as a nazi security guard where she met this soldier. They were married and she was moved to the concentration camp with him and her children to live with him while he helped run the camp. She would watch the trains being unloaded and take prisoners who had tattoos and order them to be killed and then skinned so she could use their skin for gloves, book covers, lamp shades, and many other startling but true items.
The most stressful of essays are the ones that I have to write for every single college application I fill out. The stress of writing an essay on a specific topic and hoping that you say the right things and do not say the wrong things and hope that they like your essay over everyone else in the pile is the worst feeling in the world. I have gone through almost twenty- three rough drafts cutting, and copying, and pasting, and deleting in general so many things to try and get my essays just right. I have to stay directly on topic and never stray. I have to make sure that my English is in well-rehearsed and proper grammar, and most of all I have to pray to God that my essay is not laying next to an essay written by an intended English major.
Essay writing is probably the most stressful thing that I ever have to do for homework or for any other reason. I have written a lot of essays on different serial killers such as Elisabeth Bathory who used to kill virginal girls and bath in their blood and also sometimes used to drink it. Charles Manson who listened to The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” and it led him to believe that there was going to be a race war and him and his followers would escape to the desert on dune buggies. I have also written about Myra Hindley who committed incredibly vulgar and violent acts all in the name of having a seriously intense crush on a man she met at work who did not even love her until she changed everything about herself to please him.
These types of essays can be enthralling and very much easier to write but that does not make them any less time consuming and or annoying. I hate that most of the assignments we get in classes are just merely what is referred to as “Busy Work” to keep us from getting into trouble or anything like that. Why can we not just be given the information and asked to write just a brief reflection paper on what we have learned and skip the essays, home work questions, quizzes, and especially skip all of the tests. Essays that have to be a certain length are the worst of all kinds. If there is no word count then it seems like you can write a million words, however when there is a set word count it seems as though you cannot figure out what to say to fill the count. This leads to even more stress and therefore a deeper hate for essay writing.
If essays were invented to torture school kids then they have done their duty to society. Essays were invented as a type of writing to express a topic. I don’t really mind writing essays as long as I can choose the topic, or the topic is interesting and as long as there is no set word count I actually find them to be very easy, perhaps even entertaining. The essays that are on boring topics and have a set word count are the ones that give essays a bad name and cause them to be associated with words such as “annoying and tedious” instead of “interesting and educational”.