People; no matter how perfect they seem to be, like Olympic gold medalist Shaun White is to snowboarders, can have mistakes even in what they do best. Writing is what I do best and I’ve always been good at it against my will. However, I do have my strength and weaknesses in writing. My writing strengths, so far, has been my grammar, spelling, and organization. Nevertheless, I could use strong verbs to bring my writings to life and good paragraph transitions to improve my writing. Widening my arsenal of vocabularies will also be part of my strategy to improve my writing and to better bring out my ideas into writing.
Speaking of ideas, mulling over ideas on what to write about the subject is a breeze for me. Even before I begin writing, they start flooding through my mind like an angry waterfall. To make the reader understand my ideas I need to spell them right, and spelling is one of my basic instinct second only to my other basic instinct to spot a hot chick a mile away. Anyway, spelling comes natural to me as an actor is with acting and every time I write something, even if it’s just a note to a friend, I always check my spelling. I’m also an actor when it comes to writing. I love pretending to be somebody else and I love it. Acting through writing is way better than the real thing if you’re like me who can never cope with stage fright. Acting, however is not just one of my talents, I’m also a good follower. If there is an outline, I can follow it right away like a bloodhound and improve on it.
Improvement, however, is what I should apply in my writing as a whole and not just on outlines. Part of my writing which I would love to improve is showing my ideas that are still on my mind through writing. The floods of ideas inside my head are just too much for my puny hand to handle. My spelling instinct even fails me when my hand tries to keep up with my brain. My head is too occupied with my ideas that I rely too much on pre-made outlines to put them together obliterating other creative ways I could have weaved them together like a fine silk that would’ve caught the most particular tailor of all. Color, an important part of any silk for it to attract attention and sell itself, is also what my writing needs. I need color and more action to my voice to make it more convincing and, if I was making a movie, to be Oscar-winning.
I’ve heard amazing things about how Oscar-winning movies are made and how actors resort to ways just to be like their character in those movies. Those movies use the movie-making process effectively to have a good movie to please the critic’s eye. Using the writing process is the same as movie-making, in my opinion, and one of my strategies to improve my writing should be to use it effectively to polish my ideas and please my critic’s eye. To polish my ideas, I need to start with organizing my thinking to utilize the floods of ideas to use in my writing, like how a river supports entire civilizations, otherwise, the river could easily flood and wipe it all out of history. I could further improve it by using strong verbs to make a more convincing voice and to draw the audience in like a good movie.
Writing is like a movie for me, it brings a message, represents a voice, it can be told in many perspectives, and it must keep the audience on the edge of their seats. I want the audience who reads my writing to feel like they are watching a movie, or inside another person’s mind. To do that, I need to improve on my writing strengths and weaknesses not just by organizing my ideas, using stronger verbs, and being creative in my paragraphs and organization, but in all its aspects including emotional and physical aspects.

"Why Iago chose to destroy Othello and Desdemona even though he was jealous of Cassio..."



My grandpa, who was a gardener, told me once how to properly kill weeds. You must pull them by the roots or poison its nourishment in order for it not to grow back and kill your crop. I think Iago knew my grandpa. Iago must have followed that advice because my grandpa was such an expert at gardening. The only thing is, gardening was not where Iago used that advice.
Iago did hate Cassio for being the lieutenant instead of him, but Cassio was just the weed’s leaves. Iago wanted to destroy Othello because of his failure to see the achievements he has done that Cassio did not have. Iago expressed this hatred of Othello to Roderigo in Act I, Scene I, when they were planning to tell Barbantio of his daughter’s disappearance in the hands of Othello. He used Desdemona, the one that’s nourishing the roots, against Othello, the roots of all his hatred.
Iago did not intend to destroy Desdemona,in Act III, Scene III, Line 525, he even asked Othello to let her live when Othello told him he wanted to kill her. He tarnished Desdemona’s clean reputation to make Othello suspicious and mistrustful of her. He was pulling the roots while poisoning the soil because he knew that when both are gone, the leaves would wither and die leaving him to harvest the crop.
Iago knew that if he destroyed Othello, then he would have more of what he wanted. He did not view Cassio as a real threat because he had him dancing in the palm of his hand by the way that he was manipulating him to make Othello jealous. He did not intend to destroy Desdemona, Othello did that himself. Iago almost executed his plan if it weren’t for his wife, Emilia, who revealed his intentions of becoming rich and wanting to be the new leader in Othello’s place. The gardener was bitten by an ant and jerked his hand from the weed to kill it instead of fully pulling out all of its roots. My grandpa forgot to tell him that when you pull out weeds, you can pull out ants as well.

Marco Creer
Tohatchi High School
Potential to Contribute



My goal for going to college and being a nurse will be to help my family, not only here in United States, but also in the Philippines including my cousins and their families there. Being a nurse will be a great opportunity for me to travel, help people, and see the world. Furthermore, as a nurse, I will volunteer in any communities that need nurses here in United States and in any country. I have heard of some countries having great need for nurses than we do and I want to help them. I need to go to college so i can help out my family back home. Since we have only been here in this country for a short period, we weren't able to save money for college. My relatives back home need the money more than we do. The only way I can go to college is by getting a scholarship or through financial aid programs. I am almost a senior here in Tohatchi and I am currently looking for scholarships that I can apply for college. This program will enable me to fulfill my dream of being a nurse so I can help, not only those patients in hospitals, but my community and others around the world. Furthermore this program will aid me in my college application process when I am a senior and help me understand how applications for financial aids and scholarships work.

I have always been proficient at every subject that I have taken. Math is not everybody’s favorite subject, but I think it is challenging and fun; history is my favorite subject and I love studying it; science for me is as challenging as math, but twice the fun. In my opinion, I have done fairly well in all of them. However, I would say that the subject that I have excelled in at my school is English. Back on my sophomore year, I really hated writing essays because I easily got bored of the work. Other aspects of English such as grammar was fine with me and I was proficient with them, but when it comes to writing essays, I found it hard to put my ideas into writing. I preferred saying my ideas, but writing, I thought, wasn’t for me. Because of that, English wasn’t a subject that I looked forward to at school. Nevertheless I knew I needed to learn how to write essays because I would have great need of that skill for college.
However, over the next few years I began to like writing. By learning the writing process and working on different topics that interested me, writing them began to get easier for me. Because of my English teacher’s help, I began to love English and at the same time I began to excel in it. Now I’m one of the top students in my English class as well as my year. English is one of the classes where my grade is the highest and English is not even my native language.
Every subject I have been in, I have had excelled. However, I feel English was the one that I really had a hard time dealing with and triumphed. It was a great challenge for me and my hard work and diligence finally paid off. I had some obstacles I had to cross in other subjects as well, but I had loved those subjects and I felt those were not really my hardest trials. Conquering your fears, finally facing your hardest test and not only overcoming it, but learning to love it in the end is how you really excel. English was the hardest trial I had to face among my classes and I conquered and came on top.