writerly biography

My name is Sierra Shryock, I am a 19-yr old college freshman at Missouri Western State University in Saint Joseph, Missouri. I was born and raised in Saint Joseph. My major here at Western is Biology with concentration of Health Science. With this major I plan on becoming a medical pathologist and they do autopsies on people to figure out how they died.  Ever since I can remember, I have always been interested in writing. I started writing short stories and poems in the seventh grade. At first, it just started out as assignments, but when I could choose the topic, I fell in love with it. My first writing had to be about a significant event. For this paper, I chose to write about my cousin’s death. This was significant because my cousin was like a brother to me. After this paper, we were able to write about anything. I started writing horror stories. I have been writing them ever since. I like to write because it’s a way to escape reality and whatever you want to have happen will.

                My strengths as a writer are that I add detail. I add a lot of detail to my papers, I try to describe the event that is happening to where the audience that is reading it, almost has a movie playing in their head. I tend to be very graphic with my details and by graphic I mean gory graphic with blood and everything. My weaknesses in my writings are citations and the fact that I tend to get off of the topic. I sometimes will be writing a story and something will pop into my head and I will put it in the paper or story and I will stay on that topic and just kind of leaving the audience hanging. When I am doing citations, I have problems with trying to figure out where to put all the information to where the paper makes sense. Other than these two problems, I love writing and I do it often.

When I do write a story that I made up or a paper that is due in class I tend to write it without any kind of pre-write whatsoever and I do this very quickly. Since I add a lot of detail to my papers, they tend to be long. I have written a story just because and it is 15 pages long and it’s still not even half way done. I tend to think of the most random things and that’s what my papers are about. I have written “Route 666” which yes the title is from a movie but it has nothing to do with the movie. It is titled that just because a killing happens on that street. I have wrote a story called “Man By Day, Tiger By Night.” The title is self explanatory and it’s about a man that turns into a killer tiger. Another one that I have written is called “Stink” this is about a killer ferret attracted to farts. The most random things will sometimes make the best stories.

On the other hand, reading is also sort of one of my strong points. I say sort of because it depends on the text that I am reading. If it is a novel or something I find interesting (e.g. Twilight Saga, Nicholas Sparks’s books, etc.) then I will read the story pretty quickly and I will be able to comprehend things quickly as well. However, if it is something that I find boring and dull (e.g. textbooks, some articles, etc.) I will have problems reading the text and comprehending it. The reasoning behind these things is because I will have to go back and read it more than twice to understand what the reading is about. I also test better on paper rather than computer. I know this because I took a reading class and every time I took the test online, I kept scoring lower, but when I had the hard copy of the test right in front of me, I got a much better and higher score.