Write and Grow

Writing has always been magical in my life. I remember when I was in third grade, there was a writing competition in the city, and I was asked to write about my country. As a eight year old girl, I knew nothing about the political side of my country, so that I just composed that essay with my own ordinary experiences and feelings. Compare to those students who stuffed their work with beautiful words and tedious news from the television, I even got better award. From that time, I started to realise that writing has much deeper meaning than words themselves. It is a kind of art that derives from life, and flows with people’s minds. As a writer, I have crossed a huge step through these months' learning. When I read back my writings, there are not only my improvements in writing efficiency, depiction and analysis, but also the changes of perspective that occurred among the lines. 

I have been in my Writing and Comp class for almost a whole semester, and this period of time provided me some unparalleled experiences that made me more experienced on dealing with little problems in writing. At the beginning of this year, my first blog post was about three songs. Ms. Guarino asked us to choose three of our favourite songs and write some comments. I was pretty excited because I did not know a writing class could be that fun.  I felt my brain was full of ideas when I began to do my writing homework. I spent almost half an hour on picking the songs, and another half an hour on writing the comments. I posted my majestic work and waited for a fantastic score. However, the tragic happened--a bad grade showed up. I even could not believe my eyes! There were emotions, details, and comments in my writing, and those should have been the reliable guards of a good grade. I could not help wondering what caused the problems. Finally, I came up with three possible reasons: First, the number of words. A regular blog post should have more than five hundreds words, but in thirty minutes, I only typed three hundreds and sixty one words. Second, the situation or the emotion that the songs conveyed were not totally expressed by my depiction. Third, the mental analysis and the thesis in my writing could not be found clearly and directly. Yes, I spent another half an hour on figuring out the reasons above, and now, I suddenly realised that I have been doing this kind of thinking for my writings for the last whole eight months! These problems are typical in all of my writings. Since that time, I started to try my best to avoid them. Finally, through countless practices, I can easily write a essay that is even above eight hundreds words, and my depiction and analysis also became more detailed and comprehensive. 

Sometimes I could feel my progress when typing down the sentences fluently, but sometimes, there were even more surprising improvements about thinking that hided behind the lines. In our writing class, writing was not all we did. By rereading the essays, doing peer checking, and amending drafts over and over again, I gradually became capable of handling even some tiny grammar or structural mistakes. We had many in-class brainstorming which helped me to come up with more useful ideas through the communication with others. We have made stories, argumentative essays, diaries, and even videos. All of these different types of “writings” strengthened my ability of connecting sentences and understanding the magic among the combinations of letters. However, although I technically became a better words user, I do not regard this as my biggest achievement. In fact, thinking is the most welcomed guest in my writing world. Some changes became obvious during my thirty-day challenge. It was not easy to excavate materials from my ordinary life, but five hundreds words blog were like the essay mountains that I had to climb. I even wanted to give up several times. However, through a whole month’s frustrating squeezing, I suddenly found out that I started to see things from a different point of view. That is a special new perspective that I have not touched before. For example, in one of my blogs, I described the process of analysing an ordinary calendar. Instead of writing the details of the patterns on the calendar, I explored the meaning of its composition and discussed its business strategies base on Phycology. See, I began to approach subjects by digging through the phenomenon and investigating the essence. If the improvements of writing skills are the inevitable results after abundant practices, then, this logical turing was the gift that I was not able to imagine before this semester. 

“Live and learn.” This is an old dictum that I have knew for more than ten years. It means you should never stop gaining new knowledges no matter what you have achieved already. Indeed, this semester’s practices are not only a sign of my improvements, but also a beginning that inspires me to keep fighting. Besides my progresses on basic skills and thinking mode, there are still plenty of  spaces waiting for me to get better, and I may focus more on the word selection and sentence structure in next years’ writing class. Anything can be replaceable except what root in your brain. Those memorable writings have already became the nutritions that I garnered for myself, and this priceless period of time will always be remembered.