My Wordy New Year's Resolution by ShaKeivn

My Wordy New Year's Resolution by ShaKeivn - January 2016 Scholarship Essay

One of my New Year’s resolutions, and also my most important resolution for the year of 2016 is to expand my vocabulary. As a junior in high school, I’ve learned that this is my time to really buckle down and get serious about preparing for not only my senior year, but college as well!

I started the scholarship application process around the end of November and came to realize that majority of them required one or more essays. For me that wasn't a problem at all considering I love to write, but the only issue I was actually having was that all my essays just seemed… bland. I didn't know whether it was just because I was so used to my fictional stories and free verse poems, or that I was just beginning to slack in my writing skills. As I asked my teachers and friends to proofread my essays, the only thing they usually pointed out was punctuation errors and misspelled words until I went to my mother about the situation.

She read all three of the essays I had wrote and finalized only to tell me in the end that every single one of them sounded “uninspiring and dull”. It did hurt my feelings a bit although I knew it was true. She knows that writing it a very important part of my daily life and how distraught I was about my writing issue, so she sat down with me and gave me some tips on what to do.

As we began to analyze all the essays I had written for my scholarships and even dual credit classes, she told me something that really made since. She pointed out to me that my choice of words were so simple… Excuse me, I mean straightforward. As she read a few excerpts out loud, every time she came across an uncomplicated word, she would say a synonym related to the word instantly making each sentence an attention getter and also improving the flow of it all.

As the New Year began to approach, my family and I started to work on our resolutions. Mine consisted of the typical weight loss goal, healthier eating, but most importantly working on my vocabulary. Each month I plan to search and study ten words I have no type of knowledge of whatsoever, and incorporate them all into whatever writing piece I'm working on at that moment. I can tell it's definitely been paying off considering my Physics teacher commended me on using the term ‘penultimate’ when he asked about a page in my research paper.

I feel that this New Year's resolution will most definitely help me become a better student when it comes to assignments, but also a better individual as well.. When I learn a new word, it puts me on to new insights and also makes the most simplest questions and statements sound so educated grabbing my listener's attention quickly. It may not be anything dramatic, but it's help me kickoff this New Year to a good start at school and also in the public. This is a highly exceptional concept that I’ve recommended to all my close friends and family hoping they see it to be as important as I do.

I’ve learned that expanding your vocabulary does not mean only going for the “big words”, it's about learning a new word or even a group of words that are closely related to the word you were already familiar with and going from their. It was hard at first for me, but practice makes perfect and I know it will pay off one day.