Ms. Hogue
English 11, 1st hour
January 19, 2006

Polished Draft #1

"When people keep telling you that you can't do a thing, you kind of like to try it." Margaret Chase Smith

When I was about ten years old, I found the novel To Kill a Mockingbird on our bookshelves, and I told my mother that I would like to read it. She told me that she didn't think I would understand it, that the book was "too grown up" for me. Well, of course, I read it anyway. Maybe I didn't understand it the way I do now, but I remember enjoying it back then all the same. I have never been the kind of person who likes being told I can't do something. I am stubborn that way. If someone tells me a task will be too hard or that I probably won't succeed, in my head a little voice says, "Oh yeah, well, you just wait." I think, however, that I am not alone in this. I always hear stories of successful people who seemed to be against great odds. In analyzing the situation later, one might say that they didn't know they couldn't succeed; they didn't know they shouldn't have been able to do the thing they did. Or maybe someone told them they couldn't do it and that spurred them on with a ferocity that made failure impossible.

(By the way, this paragraph is 200 words).