Robyn's Personal Statement: 5th Try

I could never say how I feel when I write poetry; but I could write it. When that inspiration hits and your fingers itch for the sensation of putting pen to paper. You do not think of themes or subtext but scribble the outpour and turn inspiration to words, emotions to themes, instinct to metre. You breathe in the ideas and breathe out the design as your entire being becomes the words you write.

No one ever taught me to write; I was taught by the books I read. As a child I would revel in Burnett’s The Secret Garden and giggle at Mitton’s Plum. As a teenager I found solace in Alcott’s 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 Lessing’s The Golden Notebook to Smith’s White Teeth and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. There are three areas, however, which I feel a particular passion for. The first is 19^th century literature, the likes of Pride & Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Portrait of a Lady. The second are novels which push society’s boundaries, such as Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Ellison’s Invisible Man and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Lastly, I have a great love of international literature including Balzac’s Old Goriot, Tolstoy’s 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.

Studying law gave me fundamental analytical and essay writing skills which I use in my occupation of writing legal articles for a Barrister. Politics has allowed me to practise rhetoric, which I hadn’t done since debating competitions in year 9. In my extended project I combined Politics with English, arguing the extent to which Orwell’s 1984 has become our political reality. English literature and language allowed me to greatly improve my writing through the creative writing element of the course and studying how authors craft literary texts.

My passion for literature is something I sought to pass on while I was a teaching assistant in a year 9 and 10 class. I loved teaching and went on to teach a GCSE preparation lesson to year 9 and did a Stop & Search Rights law assembly for year 10.

All that I had worked on over the course of year 12 culminated in a Jack Petchy award for being an outstanding achiever. I received £200 to spend on any area of my school and I chose to split it between two new projects starting in year 13. The first was the school production which I wrote 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 did a presentation at the channel 4 studios to the stakeholders of our group on what we had learnt. While the programme ended in October our group have continued to work together to resolve issues within our communities.

I am a subscriber to the Writer’s magazine and have been on a Poetry School course but feel that I have so much to learn. In June I attended an English degree event made up of several lectures and sat in the back of the lecture room listening to the professor, I was mesmerised. After only a few hours of lectures I knew that English was the degree for me and the only thing missing was the chance to be taught how to write myself too. English and creative writing is the perfect course for me and a subject that is an integral part of my life. I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend the next three years than at your University becoming the best writer I can be.