Robyn's Personal Statement: 6th Try

In the Philosophy of Composition, Edgar Allen Poe said that writers ‘prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy – an ecstatic intuition’. I am one such individual. When I write I don’t think of themes or metre. I scribble the outpour and turn inspiration to words, breathing in the ideas and out the design.
No one ever taught me to write; I was taught by the books I read. As a child I would revel in The Secret Garden and giggle at Mitton’s Plum. As a teenager I found solace in Little Women and was stunned by Zephaniah’s Too Black, Too Strong. Today, I would require an extra 4000 characters to list the novels that have passed through my hands; everything from The Golden Notebook to Eugene Onegin. There are three areas which I feel a particular passion for, the first being 19^th century literature with the likes of Pride & Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Portrait of a Lady. The second are novels which push society’s boundaries, such as Jude the Obscure, Invisible Man and Of Mice and Men. Lastly, I have a great love of international literature including Old Goriot, War and Peace and Freely’s The Other Rebecca but feel that translated novels lose the authors syntactical crafting. It was this that sparked my interest in studying French and I now seek to become fluent.
All of my A Level subjects have developed my skills in English. They have all improved my essay writing skills and provided a forum for practising rhetoric. In my extended project I combined Politics with English and my essay writing skills to argue the extent to which Orwell’s 1984 had become our political reality. I chose the combination of English literature and language because of the creative writing element of the course which specifically taught me how to write and allowed me to improve my writing, something which I had never had the chance to do before. Having now had this experience, I have no intention of letting it go and have immersed myself in the world of creative writing.
I have completed three Poetry School courses and subscribed to The Writer’s Magazine. I also spent 8 months as a teaching assistant in a year 9 and 10 English class and mentored a group of lower school students on planning the school production. Combined with my other community work, this culminated in a Jack Petchy award as an outstanding achiever and my contribution to creative writing within my school. I received £200 to spend on any area of my school and I split it between two new projects starting in year 13. The first was the school production which I wrote and look to produce this spring and secondly a new school magazine for which I am editor.
Outside of school, I was chosen by the Windsor Fellowship to be part of a leadership and dialogue programme with 11 other young people from around London. As a group we discussed the issues facing young people in London today and worked on how to resolve them through communication. The programme involved several seminars and a two week trip to America to work with Americans and Iraqis on communication. In October we will be doing a presentation at the Channel 4 studios to the stakeholders of our group on what we had learnt. Despite the programmes end in October, our group will continue to work together to resolve issues within our communities and have already made steps to doing so.
In June I attended an English degree event of several lectures at a University. While mesmerised by the detailed manner of analysing author’s work, I still found myself itching for the opportunity to practise what I was being taught. The course English and Creative Writing scratches this itch to an extent I could never have imagined. The days have passed since writing was simply a euphoric hobby for me; it is now a future I am tirelessly working towards. Over the past 10 years I have been taking small steps for man but I know that reading this course with your University will be my giant leap for mankind.