My Experience of Writing
Whenever I have to write a narrative, which is the only text type I have ever written, I encounter no difficulty in finding the subject or main idea to write about. I’m usually inspired by true stories, stories that someone has told me or that I have read in the newspapers or heard in the news. Sometimes, I change the ending or add new characters to make the story more appealing.
As regards my weak points, it takes me days to write a narrative. Knowing the plot of the narrative is just the first step but then I have to capture the story in a sheet of paper, which is not an easy task. Cohesion, Coherence, spelling, collocations, idioms and enriching vocabulary are many of the issues that we have to bear in mind when writing, so you can imagine my working table when I have to plunge into this complex task, full of dictionaries and notes.
Despite this time-consuming task, I really get pleasure from writing because I can see the progress and I must admit that I owe most of my improvement to my peers and myself. I state this because I have written dozens of narratives at the teacher training college and yet no one has ever taught me how to write a narrative. The teachers just graded my compositions and wrote remarks like: sp (for spelling) wo (for word order) or g (for grammar). Even though these are very important when writing, I believe that we should be taught how to write. I mean how to present, develop and conclude a story. Spelling and word order are issues that we will inevitably learn along with the course and we can do it alone but in order to write a good narrative, we need a guide and this is the teacher’s duty. That’s why I decided, this year, to enroll in this course. When I learnt that Analia Kandel`s course was focused on “the process of writing”, I said to myself “this is what I want”.
To conclude, I would like to add that I strongly disapprove of writing a composition in a final exam. First, we are under great pressure and it is difficult to get a well written story in that situation. Second, we cannot rely on tools, we have no dictionaries or notes to check and I believe that any writer, even well experienced writers use different tools and do research to achieve their aim. This reason leads to the third and probably the most important reason to me: to assess writing, teachers should take into account the progress, the development, the improvement of every student and not just a story written in two hours under pressure and without any material to resort to.
Whenever I have to write a narrative, which is the only text type I have ever written, I encounter no difficulty in finding the subject or main idea to write about. I’m usually inspired by true stories, stories that someone has told me or that I have read in the newspapers or heard in the news. Sometimes, I change the ending or add new characters to make the story more appealing.
As regards my weak points, it takes me days to write a narrative. Knowing the plot of the narrative is just the first step but then I have to capture the story in a sheet of paper, which is not an easy task. Cohesion, Coherence, spelling, collocations, idioms and enriching vocabulary are many of the issues that we have to bear in mind when writing, so you can imagine my working table when I have to plunge into this complex task, full of dictionaries and notes.
Despite this time-consuming task, I really get pleasure from writing because I can see the progress and I must admit that I owe most of my improvement to my peers and myself. I state this because I have written dozens of narratives at the teacher training college and yet no one has ever taught me how to write a narrative. The teachers just graded my compositions and wrote remarks like: sp (for spelling) wo (for word order) or g (for grammar). Even though these are very important when writing, I believe that we should be taught how to write. I mean how to present, develop and conclude a story. Spelling and word order are issues that we will inevitably learn along with the course and we can do it alone but in order to write a good narrative, we need a guide and this is the teacher’s duty. That’s why I decided, this year, to enroll in this course. When I learnt that Analia Kandel`s course was focused on “the process of writing”, I said to myself “this is what I want”.
To conclude, I would like to add that I strongly disapprove of writing a composition in a final exam. First, we are under great pressure and it is difficult to get a well written story in that situation. Second, we cannot rely on tools, we have no dictionaries or notes to check and I believe that any writer, even well experienced writers use different tools and do research to achieve their aim. This reason leads to the third and probably the most important reason to me: to assess writing, teachers should take into account the progress, the development, the improvement of every student and not just a story written in two hours under pressure and without any material to resort to.
