The fact that throughout my whole high school experience I had about five chances to use my laptop, either to write essays or to prepare presentations, was not a great advantage for me when I arrived at DePaul.
You might think of Italy as a country where people spend their whole life sipping wine from fancy glasses and smoking cigarettes on a porch, or still only hand write just for the sake of sticking with the good old tradition. The reader will judge how much of my enthusiasm and newly gained confidence is justified. It was soon clear to me that that my issues were not about being as fast at writing as I would be in Italian, but mainly about discovering a completely different mindset and understanding my teachers’ requests. English and Italian are two radically different languages, reason why I think that having been forced to write and fulfill certain assignments throughout my 103 and 104 WRD classes had a huge effect on me. Because I was not able to express myself in Italian, I often felt inadequate and limited. It took me months to accept myself as a decent English writer. The task becomes even harder when the language you are writing in is not the one you grew up with. Writing is a rather complicated way to communicate.