When I was in the fourth grade of the elementary school, I had a chance to listen to an essay-writing lecture in my hakwon. I learned the basic organization and logic of an essay. I wrote an essay almost every day and practiced to adapt the basic structure to my essays. At first, writing an essay was very difficult and took extremely long time, but as I learned more and wrote more, essay writing became easier. Afterwards, I wrote more complicated essays and creative writings for additional six years, and I could establish my writing style. This essay would be a great chance to reflect my style, strengths, and weaknesses in my writing, and my characteristics and goal as a writer.
In an academic writing, I have a very straightforward and concise style of writing. I try to go straight to my main points in an organized structure. I set a few paragraphs and arrange my details in an appropriate paragraph. Within the paragraph, I dispose the points, examples, and explanations in a logical order. Therefore I make my writing clear and easily comprehensible. In addition, my sentences are very concise. I do not like to put lots of flowery words to make my description gorgeous. Those florid words might be able to give the readers impression that I am an elaborate writer, but they won't bring out sincere sympathy from the readers. Moreover, I do not write long sentences with lots of phrases and commas because they make me complicated. I believe that the readers would be complicated, too. Therefore, I try to be clear and simple in my essay.
In a creative writing, I like to take an objective point of view in describing the actions and feelings of the characters. I feel that objective point of view makes the writing look elegant. I especially like to explain the surprising twist of the story in a disinterested tone, as if the twist was all natural and predictable. In addition, I try a lot to describe the emotions and thoughts of the characters as elaborately as possible. I think that a creative story is all about the feelings and thoughts of the characters. The events in the story are caused by how the characters with certain personality feel in certain situation. Therefore, minute depictions about the emotions and thoughts make the story more interesting, logical, and detailed. I particularly enjoy writing horror stories and portraying the horror the characters feel.
My biggest weakness as a writer is that I do not know vocabularies enough. I often find difficulty in selecting proper vocabularies, especially simple daily dialogue vocabularies. In fact, vocabulary books such as 'WordSmart' teach me a lot of complicated and academic words, but I didn't have a chance to encounter the dialogue vocabularies because I have never been abroad. Moreover, I do not know the slight differences of the meanings of the words that show same result in English-Korean dictionaries. Therefore, I often choose awkward vocabularies that do not fit in the flow of the context. I should read lots of books and study 'WordSmart' eagerly to broaden my vocabularies and overcome my weakness.
My goal as a writer is to lead the readers to have the emotions and thoughts that I intended to bring out. In other words, I want to move readers' minds by my writing. For example, I want to persuade the readers and make them think the same way as I think when I write an article about political and social issues. I expect from my readers to be horrified and think about the cruelty of human nature when I write a horror story.
One of my writings I am very proud of is the term paper about the student government in KMLA. I introduced the roles of the student government, the examples and counter-examples of the successful student government, the problems, student governments in other schools, and possible solutions to the problems. Particularly, I introduced the concept of the honor committee, how it is held in other schools, and the necessity to adapt the committee to KMLA. I think I organized the writing logically and clearly. In addition, I pointed out the problems acutely, and brought out novel solutions. In fact, Mr. Johnson liked my term paper very much, and introduced my paper on his blog. He often talks with me about ways to practice the solutions I addressed. We are interested about the idea of honor committee, and we are planning to make a movement to revive the honor committee in KMLA. You can read the writing in the following link: http://horraywwkd.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/student-government-of-korean-minjok-leadership-academy/.
I want our class to be a great opportunity to read books, discuss about them, and memorize more vocabularies. I think these activities would help me to overcome my weaknesses and accomplish my goal as a writer. Moreover, I hope I would be able to write various types of writings, including creative writings such as horror stories. I am expecting to be a better writer who can move readers' minds through this class.
Wow. I read most of your paper about KMLA's student government, and learned many things that I formerly only had a vague clue about. Your writing style is well suited to this kind of topic, especially your clear and to the point "no funny business" tone. You are a serious writer, writing about serious things, and I think Law School might be calling your name.
답글삭제Effective grammar, and good command of sentence structure. One thing I might suggest, however, is relying a little bit less on transitions such as "moreover" and "therefore" etc., as it can get a bit mechanical if overused. I'm sure you can add more phrases to your repertoire that will add some color.
As for the "honor code," my feeling is that all politics tends to idealize the human condition, while also tending to ignore the reality of human nature. Corruption is an ugly thing, and so is abuse of power. Lying and cheating should be avoided at all costs. But will it be avoided at all costs? Not if the cost requires a lot of discomfort. Rules aren't made to be broken. They are broken from the start. And yet, we do need them, and we need to hear about them repeatedly.
You did a great job of tackling a difficult topic in that paper, and you clearly felt strongly about it. I hope we can find similar energy in this semester.