Blog #5 - Yakun

Writing in English and Chinese are very different experiences for me although I admit the way speaking in English is similar with that in Chinese. Actually, I’ve never learnt anything about academic writing in China, even when I was in the university. Therefore, the logic and the clear topic and outlines are my absolute weakness. It took me a long time to think of the supporting reasons or subtopics so that I was not able to finish a long article in class. You know, it is so frustrating when I fail the English writing test, which is supposed to have a general knowledge of my English skills, not because of how well I handle those alphabets but time wasting on thinking about the supportive details. Looking back my progress of English writing, I consider logical thinking and vocabulary as the portion that deadly needs improvement, while I guess I’m doing better on the grammar and sentence structure portion. When it specifically comes to the summarizing skills, I can correctly cite, use the reporting verbs and paraphrase, but I always felt headache about editing since I couldn’t find out easily where to polish.

In fact, I’m not a-hundred-percent satisfied with my digital story script because I don’t think I fully express myself. I didn’t use the conflict or humor but I did mention some examples like my own experience and cultural difference. Anyway, I did spend lots of time working on a better script. However, I’m an extremely perfectionist which means I work very, very hard on everything but still hardly ever feel satisfied with any of my work. Thus, I always think it more or less has some room to become better including this digital story. But anyway, I’m doing study in foreign language as well as in foreign language, so I’d better take it easy and see improvements more than shortcomings.