Colby Turley ’29
Hometown
Mount Vernon, Iowa
Academic Interest
Business Management
When I was 15 years old, my parents sent me to Colorado to take the Johnson O’Connor Aptitude Test. When we eventually got to the writing portion of the test, I was very excited. I was given 15 minutes and a prompt: “What if writing didn’t exist?” In the end, I wrote about 250 words. 250 magnificent words in combination with sentences that were soft when it was emotional and strong when I needed it to be. It was my masterpiece, yet when the testers gave us the results, I was shocked to see that I had received a low score. The only things about my writing that were noted were that it was 250 words and that one word was misspelled. I was broken, as I assume most writers are, when I realized that the world does not care about your writing in the same way that you do.
Some people look at an essay like mine and see only that there was an error. Ignorant of the fact that writers do not write for the sake of writing, they write to express themselves. They write because to them, each work is a masterpiece in and of itself. There are some claims that students take English classes for years yet still do not know how to write properly, and another that there is a correct way to write. But that is the beauty in writing, is it not? That each word is a reflection of oneself on the page, there is no right or wrong, there is just you. You, a young writer still new in the world, first beginning to understand both yourself and the world as a whole. You, a young writer, already facing challenges and setbacks just to be able to put their thoughts on a page.
Too many teachers look not at what you write but how you write it. Therefore, there is a fear that no matter how well you write, you will never be good enough. Students have to stress over and rewrite and revise and redo and it is never enough. Never enough to be able to please the standards that have been created for them. But in the end it does not matter how their point was made, just that it was. The fear of mistakes prevents people from becoming better writers, from taking the risks to become great. We as writers have been given a gift. If you do not want to write, know that that is okay. Writing, like being perfect, is up to the individual. So do not bother writing perfectly. You should write because you enjoy writing what you believe.
*Colby’s father, Jason Turley ’93, also attended Cornell.