My father put me in to ice skates around the age when I started walking, and from there I moved on to hockey. I played hockey from the age of five until I was a senior in high school; playing on some prestigious teams that traveled to different parts of Canada and Minnesota. After finishing my last season senior year of high school, I began to realize my hockey career was full of proud achievements. However, these accomplishments were not by chance or luck. My game style had become solidified through years of work. I was not unfamiliar with failure, and had to constantly work on improving my skills set as a skater to compete in higher levels. This was all done through practice. Reflecting on the time and effort I spent practicing in learning to skate, I notice the parallels to the time and effort needed to practice writing.
Writing is not a naturally gifted talent that only a select few people possess. All successful writers took years of practice to perfect their writing. This is crucial in remembering that we as writers can develop our abilities through repeated practice.
Some of the most successful people in their fields whether it be sports, writing, science, art, and so on, constantly state that practice makes perfect. Learning to skate took years of work and practice. When I began skating, I had to learn how to maintain balance. Next, I had to learn how to keep balance while using strides to skate down the ice. Writing is similar to skating in that one must find balance in their writing if they wish to present their claim or topic. Learning to make strides can be seen as formulating ideas and transitioning them into sentences. It is important to maintain balance in your sentences as if you give too much detail or too little, you will lose the attention of the audience or fail to express your message.
Learning to crossover skates came next. Crossing over in skating are maneuvers to accelerate down the ice in corners or circles. Crossovers are difficult in skating, as it requires a great amount of balance to shift from one skate to the other. Crossing over too quickly can lead to a wipe out. Practicing crossover was difficult in the beginning, but over time it became a solid part of my game and an important one as well. Having powerful crossovers separates your skating abilities from others, and allows you to become a faster and more agile skater. I believe crossovers in skating are similar in the language we use in writing, due to the transitions involved in both practices. Like crossovers in skating, the language we use in our writing should be powerful and reflect the topic we are writing about. Language is important as it progresses your essay along to find commonality with the reader. The language we use in our writing should feel comfortable and relatable with the subject of the writing, much like feeling comfortable in your crossovers. With enough practice, the language we use in our writing can develop and become an important factor in delivering the message of our writing.
Eventually after learning to crossover, I had to focus on learning how to stop. This aspect of skating took the greatest amount of time to develop. It took many practices and many falls, until I eventually learned how to stop on ice. From there it became a regular part of my skating abilities. I believe learning to stop correlates well with taking a pause in our writing, to take time to reflect. Writing may be frustrating in expressing what you are trying to say, especially when one hits writer’s block. Taking time to pause, reflect, and revise allows us to fix our mistakes and to maintain the focus of our writing. It is also important to stop and reflect in our writing as the message you are writing about may be sidetracked by too much unnecessary detail. Pausing and reflecting on writing allows us to develop into stronger writers that can piece together what is necessary and unnecessary for the overall message.
Learning to skate was difficult in the beginning. There were many times where I felt frustrated and wanted to quit. The same can be said about writing. These writing habits are not easy and take time and practice to develop in to a stronger writer. Giving up and quitting will never allow us to reach our full potential in writing and in life. One should also remember that these practices do not just all together stop one day. We can always progress ourselves as writers, pushing to make ourselves and our writing better through repeated practice. The key to this is yet another lesson in skating: keep moving your feet. Keep practicing writing, keep making mistakes, keep moving forward, push yourself to the best you can be. The only true failure is quitting when it gets too tough.