The 500 Word
Dash
by Alex Andy Phuong
Oh my gosh! I
hate writing! It takes up a lot of
time, and it is also like reading. Some
people think that reading is a very passive
activity. That also explains why the
townspeople in Beauty and the Beast regarded
Belle as a beautiful but funny girl. They
also did not use the word “funny” as a
compliment. I also hate the fact that
I have to write a short story for my creative
writing class, which is exactly what I am doing
right now while typing out whatever comes to my
mind through the stream-of-consciousness writing
technique. I do know that William
Faulkner has done that, too, such as when he
wrote As I Lay Dying and other
celebrated novels in American literature. Oh
man, I just want this essay or story or whatever
I am doing to be over!
I also hated timed writing
when I was in high school and college. I
even had an English teacher in high school that
would use a timer that would make a really
annoying and loud noise when the buzzer went off. When
I was a community college student, I knew a girl
named Erin who screamed, “O-M-G! I
hate essay tests because you have to think and
write at the same time, and the worst part is
that there’s no spellcheck!!!!!!” I
must agree with Erin because I usually earned
“C’s” on my timed essays when I
was a simple-minded teenager.
In a weird way, though, I
still like books. I empathized with
Belle because classmates thought that I was weird
whenever I told people that I enjoyed novels like To
Kill a Mockingbird. I also never
heard of Sparknotes until my English teacher
warned us to not use that website. (The
same goes for Cliffsnotes.) I became a
very peculiar student because I read all six of
Jane Austen’s novels during the summer of
2007, and watched the film Becoming Jane. Anne
Hathaway did her best to bring the beloved author
to life, and I congratulate her on that attempt. (Kudos
to James McAvoy as well.)
I am still trying to hit
the 500 word mark on my Microsoft Word document. Sometimes
I procrastinate, which is what Spongebob did in
the episode appropriately titled, “Procrastination.” In
the episode, he wasted a lot of time with
nonsense behavior instead of finishing his 800-word
assignment on “What Not to Do at a Stoplight.” Wait
a minute! I see a very interesting
number on the corner of my document. It
says that I know have 430 words! And
now I have 436! Typing is really not
that hard. It is just that some people
do not want to take the time to write clearly nor
type effectively. So this is the end
of my story, and I somehow survived the 500 word
dash. I now have only around fifteen
more words to go. Keep going! Keep
going! Keep going! Now I
have reached the finale. Yay me! Writing
is powerful!
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