My essay entitled “English or: How I Learned to Start Writing and Embrace a Skill” (cleverly inspired by a certain 1964 film title) is my self-portrait of myself as a writer. In short, the purpose of this essay is to chronicle a point in my life where I transitioned from someone who wrote purely for school assignments to a person who embraced writing as a practical skill. Prior to these real-life situations that I exhibit in the essay, I never had a practical use for writing and rhetoric aside from getting a point across or getting a grade. My writing process consisted largely of just writing the experiences from memory and making periodical edits to enhance the storytelling or better explain any points that I was trying to make to a potential reader. I feel as though, in the end, the storytelling may have been the strongest point of the essay. While I don’t feel as though making points was necessarily a weakness of the essay, I feel as though they could have been improved further with more revision. In writing this essay, I learned about myself and my own experiences in a reflective way. Even though these experiences were clearly ingrained in my mind as significant, it wasn’t until I put them on paper that I realize why they stood out to me as significant in my writing career. Writing an essay like this forced me to think more about my own experiences and how those experiences have shaped the person I’ve become.