Being honest, I did not have a lot of chance to take a look over my previous writings and think about what kind of writers who I am. What I mostly did was writing essays on and on especially in previous semester when I had to do tremendous amounts of writing that Ms. Choi assigned. I agree that it is still important to write a lot on different topics, whether it is about literature, social argument or even daily life. However, introspection of what I have written is as important as, or possibly more important than ‘writing’ itself. In fact, I really appreciate this chance of looking over what I have previously written and thinking about what writers I am.
Obviously, people possess unique characteristic that differentiate them from others; it is also obvious that people have their own writing styles. For me, I usually write in a simple and concise manner, without any wordy vocabularies or complicated paragraph structures. Maybe, this is due to the fact that I do not know a lot of sophisticated words. However, I believe using fancy words all the time just does not help readers grab my intention and understand my writings. From my view, the priority on writing is to effectively deliver your opinion to readers, since writing is one of the ways of communication. This is basically why I use simple, but easy-to-comprehend styles in my piece of writing.
As I have mentioned in previous paragraph, one of my strengths in writing is that people clearly understands what I am trying to say or deliver. I have seldom had people who asked for interpretation of sentences or clauses that I wrote in my essay. There are some students who have a philosophical thought and writes lengthy sentences in their writings, which might be hard to understand for other people. Compared to these students, I definitely have the strength which makes my essay clear and easy to comprehend.
However, I acknowledge that my English writing is on its way of improvement and still has a lot of weakness. As shown above, I write in simple and concise manners, which is one of my strength in writing. Nevertheless, this simple style of my writing is also one of my weaknesses. Sometimes I want to express my thoughts in more eloquent and elaborated way, but it is not easy since I am very used to simple writing styles. To improve this, I have to read other’s essay more and emulate good expressions or way of writing, as there is a proverb “Imitation is the mother of creation”. Plus, I would like to write more naturally in English, since English is not my mother tongue.
I definitely look forward to this English composition class, since I previously took your Digital Storytelling class. I would make sure that I try hard as in order to improve my English writings and my overall English skills which needs a lot of improvement. Personally, I really like writing about issues that I am interested in. For example, I wrote a term-paper for Mr. Johnson’s class in last semester about Linguistic Imperialism because I am interested in different languages in the world.(see http://rnjstnsah123.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/term-paper/) Writings related to literature such as literary journals are not my top interest. However, I do want to work on and learn about how to write a good book report during this semester by reading novel ‘Different Seasons’ and doing some writing activities on it. To be honest, I don’t want Wordsmart vocabularies to take a large proportion in this course. Although vocabularies are important, there are plenty of writing related actives that students can do. By the way, I hope this English class works out fruitful for me, all of the other students and also you, Mr. Garriorch!
