Lillian Xu
Ms Guarino
English II
Dec 13th, 2015
Last Tuesday some of my classmates and I visited the writing center to work on our diary entries with the teacher there. We brought our first draft with us, and went there in our free periods. Kevin, Johnny, Minh, Jerry and I were all there with Ms Swift correcting our grammar mistakes and telling us what we are aiming for this writing. She said that this diary's main point is to write about the character's life and show the settings of the book, and all we need to take care of is the mechanical thing such as grammar.
Ms Swift looked at my diary entries and said that I am in good shape already, and then looked at others' work and corrected some of the grammar mistakes. She told us that sometimes English is hard, like grammar; she gave us some examples like, when it is a thing that had happened already, we should be using past tense; when it is a thing that is written in the past but still happening now, we should be using present tense. For example, the phrase "the campus is big" describes a campus that is still big now, but the phrase "the campus was big" describes a campus that was big before, but for some reasons it is not big now. Then she showed us National Geographic, which is a magazine that has many pictures and many interesting things happening all around the world, and said, that English is not always hard; she flipped to a page that has only a few words on it and is really easy to understand, and asked Kevin to read it out loud to us. I couldn't remember what it was talking about, but all I could remember is that this author used only less than twenty words and a picture to describe a complex detailed opinion with the readers' imaginations. Everyone has a different understanding about the same description and picture, which makes it a successful piece of writing.
Ms Swift helped me on some details on my diary entries, such as plurals and tenses. Her suggestions and corrections make my entries more grammatically correct, and point out the path that I'm writing on for the following journals. Ms Swift made me feel like my work is appreciated by others, and I'm going to keep this good work up to make my writing better. She encouraged me to enjoy the process of writing, and gave me confidence to write more about what I want to. I learned that a long and complex sentence is not the only way to express what you want to say; a short and simple sentence can also describe a lot of things. And, for gaining more knowledge, we should always read more books, magazines, and newspapers, watch more movies, and even listen to more songs.
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