yeonsoo seo / week 2 assignment / tuesday 1pm

1. Write about a pleasant experience you have had with writing. How did this experience affect your attitude toward writing?

As I love travelling, my pleasant experience with writing was keeping a travel diary and writing a complete essay about my trips after I got home. Since I experienced myriads of different life styles that I was not used to such as foods, residential features, historical sites, and the way people talk or greet others, I had lots to write about it when I grabbed my pencil. After that, I realized that getting ideas from diverse experience helps me to write about any topic with confidence. I often got rigid with nervous tension in front of a blank paper when I had to write about something because nothing popped up to my head, so I struggled to think of even one compelling details.  Since then I tried to read books, magazine, others’ writings a lot, and watch news or listen to radio as often as I can. In other words, seeing, hearing, tasting and feeling other parts of world made me realize that getting ideas from various experience both directly and indirectly is beneficent for writing.

 

2. Describe how writing was taught in your previous schooling by answering some or all of these questions: how often did you have to write? What kinds of topics did you write about? Give one or two examples. What kinds of comments did the teacher make on your papers? What was considered more important: the content of your papers (your ideas) or correct grammar and spelling(how you expressed them)?

I took a composition class when I was in America as an exchange student. I had to write an essay once in two weeks, and my essays were about describing something using five senses or comparing two different things. I described how Jjimjilbang looks like in the first essay, and ‘I compared between eating in the school cafeteria and making foods at home in the latter one. Since the class I took was the most basic one among all the composition classes, it focused on distinguishing how essay should be written when describing or comparing something. My teacher at that time told me that I should be consistent about my thesis statement because I accidently put new information into conclusion. Additionally, professor told me I should talk about one topic in each paragraph and list closely related reasons to that topic. Also, he told me when I compare two different things I should have one common standard for both. Both the content of my papers and correct grammar were important to me because I often got derailed from thesis statement whenever my essay had to be long enough, and I often made mistakes by listing unconnected examples in one paragraph. Not only that, I was not used to distinguishing article pretty well, so I put indefinite article to nouns that should have been with definite article.

 

3. Have you ever done any writing for yourself only – letters to friends or relatives, journals, diaries, poems? If so, explain how this writing was different from the writing you did for school assignments.

Since I met many good foreign friends while travelling or studying abroad, I wrote a letter to my friends who I met there before saying goodbye. I wrote a lot like two or three pages because I expressed all kinds of my feelings about every moment that I spent with them. However, when I do school assignments, I feel a little bit burdened and overwhelmed because I am restricted by deadline and I feel like my writing should be perfect to get a good grade. But, writing as school assignments was more effective as a result because my writing got organized as introduction, body and conclusion, and I should have kept focusing on being coherent and logical between lines relating to the topic.