Reflection 1 - Language is not the true barrier in writing

It was only during these days that the idea, which was only a vaguely looming shade, finally grew clear to me. Writing in english is not really the difficult part in writing english compositions, neither for me nor for the other students. The challenge in writing and living one's life, in fact, share a lot in common. A writer who wishes to wield a pen should first possess the ability to appreciate and respond to the intricate and aesthetic influences of nature or human emotions, which will will become the ‘input’ of one’s material. Second, a writer would need to be able to think logically, thereby writing logically valid and sound arguments. Otherwise the ‘input’ can never be transformed and ‘output’ into words, and words into sentences, and eventually a composition.


For the past three months I have been reading, writing and thinking extensively. I have been reading students' articles as I am a teaching assistant in the course of second year english. About 90% or higher, of the compositions are flawed in terms of grammar, few really write sentences that don’t sound odd; however, if asked to re-write the flawed sentence in chinese, about one third of them find it difficult to write it in comprehensive chinese. On the surface, it seems as if they don’t write good english, but the fact actually lies in the ability of transforming idea one’s mind into written words. Again, for about one third of the assignments, the sentences are written in chinglish. As a native chinese speaker like me, I should be able to understand, while in fact I couldn’t. It indicates that the problem in writing does not have that much to do with bad english, at least not as much as I thought. To conclude my idea, for most students who attempts to write, the problem is in semantics rather in syntax, that is, sometimes people just haven’t mastered their own language


In the past, I have written various articles and short essays, but I do not yet have experience in writing a long research paper, with the only exception of a scientific review paper which is about 1500 words long. But this is the first time that I try to put four different annotations in one research paper with a clearly-oriented thesis statement. Finding the logical connection is one challenge, i.e. input (logical thinking), and having that written on the paper is another, i.e. the output. What’s more interesting is the correlation I again found between writing and working in a microbiology laboratory. The requirement of the ‘input’ and ‘output’ ability is indeed the skill that I hone in the laboratory when we design experiments. For a biologist, she must observe, i.e. the input, so she can raise questions about life and science. And she must think logically, i.e. the output, when she designs and conducts experiments.


The above summarizes the reflection after writing the issue paper and annotations 1 & 2. However, I do not mean that language acquisition does not play a role in writing, it only comes after one can master his own language.