revise my original manuscript.

Revised Draft

October 12, 2018

Project 1

Charlie's writing secret

When I first came to America, at that time I was sixteen years old. Although I kept learning English since I was a student in elementary school, because of my earlier willfulness I made no progress. I have been more interested in science since childhood this might be a reason that I made no progress in any abilities in English. I like to explore science and enjoy the sense of achievement after answering math questions. However, language is like a magic key which can both helps us to open up a time machine that brings us to talk with our ancestors or to learn a part of world history and works with our daily communication with other people. Because language is the key to communication, at that time in high school every day since I came to the United States was like a newborn baby. Every time in my high school, English class was like a huge rock on my mind, so I set up a goal to improve my English writing ability.

At that time after I came to America and studied in high school, I could understand while people communicate with me and I were able to speak some English. When the literature teacher gave us the writing assignment, I felt desperate and helpless. My writing ability just like a baby talking nonsense stories, I was terrible in sentence structures and grammar. Besides, writing in Chinese is an entirely different format, and sentence structures compare to how we write an essay in English. In Chinese, we use characters the sentence structure I was familiar to use before causes me a big problem and confusion when I need to use English vocabularies to make sentences together. In order to accomplish the goal I set up before, during English class, the question for me is what I should do that could help me to improve my writing ability?

To answer my question, I still remembered I was calming myself down and reflecting on some of the questions that came up in my writing. Therefore, I listed some points on a piece of paper, the first problem I have is sentence structure. This is what I most scared of in writing is also the problem I were confusing the most. This first essay I wrote is about the most challenging time I met and how I conquered them. Before I started to write the essay assigned by our English teacher, I searched many related articles about how to write a proper sentence structure in English. I wrote down some tips and tried to remember them first with some practices before I began to write my first essay. Unfortunately, the first essay became a sharp sword which nearly destroyed my confidence after I received my grade and comments from my teacher. After all these researching my first step toward my goal almost felt so I decided to talk to my teacher and tried to let her taught me how to edit my essay.

Thankfully, I appreciate myself for having the courage to ask for help. Because of the help of my teacher, she provided me many useful advises that also helped me a lot in my future writing. She first helped me to write some bullet points besides each problem I made and some improvement methods in that essay. She pointed out the point that I still need to remember thirty new vocabularies every day in order to write more complex and helps me to understand better reading later days. Then she patiently wrote a short paragraph for me about her experiences on difficulties and how to conquered these problems before. She assigned a new assignment especially to me. The first one is to edit my essay again then wrote a separate short paragraph on how I thought during editing this essay.

I have followed the steps of my first American English teacher to make some changes and summarize my ideas after editing my first essay. Besides, I still remember new vocabularies every day after finishing the task assigned by my teacher. Now I still really appreciate my English teacher for her patience and time to help me improve my writing skills. These methods are how I approach my goal, I went to the teacher again and again to ask her questions and revise each essay we need to write in this class. After the first semester English class, I felt the progress of my writing strongly.

Although I am still not able to write as fluently and entirely as a native speaker, I have made progress compared with my past the goal I set before. I learned a lot from my previous failure and frustrations. First of all, the necessary point for me in English writing is to practice more and then ask a teacher or native speakers to correct some mistakes. Second, read more good articles and analyze how they structure their sentences to make a logic and fluency paragraph. Finally, keep on memorizing new words even if we only remember ten vocabularies each day. My English writing ability has improved a lot than before. I still need to keep improving and learning. I hope I can write more fluent and complete articles in the future.