Of Reading And Writing / blog 1

Jiaqi Xu
Mrs Guarino
English II
Oct 13th, 2015

Of Reading And Writing

          Reading is a meaningful thing for all humans in the world, and for me, it is one of the most important thing that I am doing everyday in my life. We read in every second while we are awake and breathing. We can be reading toilet signs, reading maps, reading people's emotions and thoughts, and even our own thoughts; or in the academic aspect, we can be reading fictions, non-fictions, newspapers and comics. Writing is connected to reading in many ways, but it is also very different from reading. If we compare reading to an input, then writing is an output; we read to get information from the outer world, and we write to give out information from our brains.
          I love to read books in both fictions and non-fictions, for example romantic, historical, adventure, and survival. I only read romantic and historical books in Chinese, because comparing to English ones, contemporary Chinese romance novels are more euphemistic and consist of more connotations, and I can understand historical articles in my mother tongue better. But because it is too figurative, many famous and good books are translated poorly from Chinese to other languages. I used to read a lot when I was in middle school, I almost finished all the books at home which filled about four to five huge bookshelves; but when I grew up, I spent more time on socializing and hanging out with friends, which had stolen a lot of my time for reading. Chinese books are easy for me to read because it is my native language that I used to speak, read and write in everyday; but for some English books it is really hard to read, because English grammar is completely different from Chinese grammar, the use of figurative language is also different, and to fully understand a novel written in English, an understanding of an enormous vocabulary is required. Many books written in English are even hard for native speakers. I started reading English novels since I was in middle school, and probably in sixth grade. My favorite novel for english class is called Hatchet, because I was reading this novel for three years and I was told to finish this book for three times in three different leveled English classes. The first time of reading this book is in sixth grade, when I was taking EAL II. I found it really hard for me because of the lack of vocabulary and my poor understanding; but when I grew up, I eventually becoming easier to understand.
          Pretty different from reading, I feel like writing is a more suffering thing for me to do in both my first and second language. Reading is a way to receive information and emotions, but reading is a way to express the thoughts and emotions. It is easier to read and understand than to actually write and express your complex thoughts, because it is hard to express how exactly you feel about something; for example, even the feeling of itchiness can even be different. My writing had a great improvement in my middle school. When I first came to the school, everyone can speak perfect English and write long and complicated essays; I felt like I was the only one who cannot speak and write in fluent English, which made me harder making friends and made my life harder. I couldn't express what I wanted to my teacher if I cannot speak or write fluently. Then in more practices, my English had great improvements; I started in the lowest level class in sixth grade, but graduated in the highest level class in eighth grade. I actually liked writing, but it is really suffering for me to read my own writing because I would have found my writing to be very silly and found a lot of does-not-make-any-sense sentences, and would have to correct them. And for many times I was just repeating the same idea using different words and sentence structures, which made my reading kind of boring and annoying. In the writing class last year, many of my problems were reduced, for example repeating ideas. Now I am writing more with my brain and less for the word count.
          Reading and writing never ends in our lives. It continues going and always has space for improvements, and just like researching in science, we will never find out anything unless we put our effort into it and to really think about it. Reading and Writing are all about the experience thing; the more you read, the more you understand, and the more you write, the better you will get.