The Wonderful Wattpad

As the semester reaches its busiest point, I often find myself not having time to open the book collecting dust on my night stand. As a history major, a lot of my homework consists of carefully analyzing primary documents; by the time I have free time, I don’t even think of cracking a book open. I’ve created this bad habit of not reading any books (besides textbooks and assigned readings) over the course of the semester, then over winter break I spend my days engulfed in any book I can get my hands on. However, I may have found a solution to my bad habit—a website called Wattpad (which I used to be obsessed with when I was younger).

Wattpad is a website where anyone can write anything, and anyone can read it, for free.

Wattpad has a plethora of different genres ranging from poetry to fanfiction. Whenever I have a moment of time before a class starts, I just pull out my phone and read a story I found on Wattpad. The only downfall that I’ve noticed is that a lot of the stories have grammatical errors, which is sometimes off-putting. Don’t get me wrong, I make tons of mistakes when I write; but when I start to notice multiple errors in one sentence, I just start thinking of how to fix the sentence rather than enjoying what the sentence is saying. The good side is that I’ve found multiple authors that have very good sentence structure and make very few grammatical errors (that I’ve noticed).

Sometimes I feel like reading a really cheesy love story, and other days I feel like reading historical fiction, so I often find it hard to commit to one book. I think the reason I am so drawn to Wattpad instead of my nearest book is because it’s so easy to find whatever genre I might be interested in on that particular day, and they are often relatively short, which is nice when I feel like I might want to read something different in a couple days. If you suffer from the bad habit of not reading for fun during the semester, check out Wattpad and see if they have a story that might spark your interests!

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Have you ever used Wattpad before, as either a writer or a reader?

Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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The English Society