I have been stuck with reading and writing for past 13 years. I have always been highly value reading and writing, but my feeling to them has always been complex. I hated writing once and I loved it later. I liked reading, but it bothered me sometimes. Along the side from primary school to middle school and from high school to university, I keep running into new difficulties. These problems made me headache but solving them was pretty worthwhile. This complicated relationship can be traced down to my childhood.
My attitudes towards writing shifted greatly before I went to high school. Writing was some dreadful work to me at about seven years old. Essays in primary schools were mostly to express personal feelings. Unluckily, that was not something I was good at. My parents were demanding about my performances. They would criticize me for being wrong, but seldom praised me for being right. In order to get their praise, I tried to hide my feelings. For instance, I pretended not to be jealousy when other kids get dolls from their parents but I didn’t, because mommy loved kids who saved money for family budget. It was a good scheme, but there was a problem: if one pretend for a long time, he or she might have trouble knowing what he or she truly feels, and if one is having trouble knowing true feelings, he or she might not be able to write good essays about them. I was that person. I used to spend hours on what to write and even more hours on how to reach the minimum word limit. Opposite to writing though, reading was my hobby. In fact, I loved all sorts of activities as long as they could keep me away from homework. Reading was the most affordable one, since there were plenty of books in my house. I read biographies, history and zoology magazines, fictions, novels, poetries and fairytales. Thanks to all those books, I began to love writing when I entered middle school. Argumentative writing was first introduced in middle school. In China, one can write a good argumentative essay by putting beautiful phrases and stories of the famous into fixed writing structures and flows. I happened to remember a lot of phrases and stories from the books I had read. My essays were always the ones of the best. Expressing feelings was still a difficulty, but it no longer concerned me. I got what I craved for, praise, from my teachers, and I loved writing. Although, deep down in my heart, I knew I wrote things that I did not quite understand.
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Things became different in my high school. It was when I decided to apply for American universities and when I learnt more about English reading and writing. I noticed the differences between English and Chinese, and these differences changed my view of reading and writing. In my perspective, Chinese and English differs in accuracy and structure of writing. Chinese writing allows ambiguous sentences which English writing doesn’t. For example, for a Chinese essay I can start a sentence with “it…” without mentioning anything that can be referred to “it”. It is the readers’ job to guess what “it” is. Often, there will be many hints about what “it” is in a good essay, but it takes effort to interpret. These undefined pronouns, like “it” or “they”, leaves blanks for readers to imagine. Just like the ending of Inception filmed by Christopher Nolan, ambiguous sentences in Chinese writing are beautiful because of incompleteness. However, English seems to value straightness and accuracy. Not only does it have more vocabulary changes to indicate the changes in tense and the quantity of noun, English also requires more clear structure in academic writing. Thesis sentence, the answer to the topic question, is usually placed in the beginning of a paragraph, and after the thesis sentence comes explanation. This sequence of writing is not required in Chinese writing. At the beginning of learning English writing, I ran into a lot of troubles: What is the subject that I want to refer to “it”? What is my answer to topic and how can I rephrase it? Because I needed to explain the logic clearly between my thesis statements and examples, I could no longer write things that I did not understand. In all, what I leant from studying English is that to explain ideas clearly is more important than to put complicated words in writing. This knowing makes me feel more comfortable about writing even though I would not have advantage in writing any more. I began to write diaries in plain words and to reflect about my daily life. Writing meant less pretentious, but more interesting to me. It became a tool to think and sharpen perspectives.
Now studying in American for one year, I have encountered more difficulties in reading and writing. American university requires much more amount of reading than I have ever did in high school. For instance, I took seven courses last semester. A single course asked for 50 pages reading assignment a week. It took me three to four hours for one reading assignment and about 25 hours for all seven courses. I never had homework like reading textbooks before class in high school. I read English textbooks slowly, sometimes painfully if I had lots of unfamiliar words. To read fast, I learnt to jump read: I read the first two sentence for a paragraph, and guessed what this paragraph was talking about. Then I read an example if there was one. If this example talked about same things as what I was thinking, I would jump to next paragraph. If there was no example or the example was about something different, I would look more specific into the paragraph. This skill does help me a lot when I have many pages to read, but the price is that I won’t be able to remember much and sometimes I will miss key points.
I know I need to do a better job in English reading and writing if I want to succeed in university. I tried to improve myself by reading English novels in vocations. I brought Arthurian Legend to read last summer, but after spending an hour on the first page, I realized that it was too early for me to read. I also played a writing game with my friend. We were required to write short essays on certain topics every night for a month. If one of us forgot to do so, she would give 10 dollars to another. I finished this one-month self-training, but the more I wrote, the more I wished there were a teacher to give me feedbacks on my essays. These efforts I spent on improving English reading and writing received little effect. I still look forward to improving my English by taking w131where I can get good readings and feedbacks from the professional. I hope that I can enlarge my vocabularies and organize my sentence more concisely by practicing in this course.
My relationship with reading and writing, though, is more complex than ever. On the one hand, I do enjoy reading and writing. I read biographies of game characters online, and translate them into Chinese. It is my way of relaxing, away from homework at weekends. On the other hand, as to reading and writing for homework, things get complicated. Occasionally, I did feel the sense of achievement when I solved problems by reading textbooks, but for most of times, reading textbooks is just tedious because of their large volume. It is like an entangled relationship in a love story in which the heroine loves a vampire but hates him for killing. I hated writing when I was little and then I loved it. I liked reading when I was little, but it makes me headache after I became a college student. If this is a story, I hope it has a happy ending where through practices, I can read and write in English easily and nicely.
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