Blog-3: Improving my writing skills

Yulieth Hassan

Blog-3

Improving My Writing Skills

Arriving in the United States (US) for the first time, can you imagine how I, an 18 years old girl From Colombia, have felt when my plane landed at the LAX airport in Los Angeles?  Now, add to this picture the fact that I spoke very little, and that is an overstatement, English.  My writing skills were of course as bad, or even worse, than my speaking skills.

I came to the US to further my education and to expand my world view of the different cultures that are concentrated in Southern California.  Very quickly, I recognized that mastering the English language, whether it be writing or speaking, was a must in order to accomplish any of my goals.  Towards this end, I enrolled in evening English classes that were tailored to those like me who spoke other foreign languages than English.  Today, I look back and wish I have kept my first English writing assignment as it can be used to gauge how much progress I have made in improving my writing skills since then.

To improve my writing skills, I recognized early that it is a process that involved a number of steps that I had to go through.  Reading books, newspapers, magazines, on-line articles, etc.– I consider that to be the most important step in this process.  Reading made me learn new words, expressions, grammar, and punctuation.  I have to admit that, in some instances, I did not understand the meaning of a word.  However, by reading the complete sentence I was able to understand what the author is trying to convey.  While reading is very important, I also feel that my final writing product was always better when I considered compiling different drafts – each one being better than its predecessor.   In this step, my friends played a big role by providing constructive criticism they pointed out/eliminated repetitions, corrected grammatical errors, eliminated jargon, and chopped very long sentences into ones that were more concise and to the point.

At CGCC, ENG-101 is a required course that I need to take towards my graduation goal.  I sought guidance and advice from the staff at the Writing Center, from my course instructor and used numerous on-line resources that allowed me to further refine my writing skills.  An on-line dictionary allowed me to translate words that I knew in Spanish, my native speaking language, to English.  The spelling and grammar checker imbedded in Microsoft’s Word 2010, also allowed me to minimize spelling and grammatical errors as well as made me aware of proper sentence composition.

My writing skills, especially as they pertain to writing essays, are getting better by the day.  All I need to do is look at the first and last drafts of any of the essays I have written.  What I usually see is a more, focused and refined final product that pleases me.  While my writing skills have improved, I still feel that I have a long way to go.  I am still struggling with mixing the “tense” (between past and present), conveying the message in a “single” or “plural” voice, and the use of the proper punctuation.  To improve in these areas, I have found, and am recommending, an on-line resource (“50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills” by Vitaly Friedman, URL: www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/28/5) that have proven to be very useful to me.

What I am posting here is a summary of what I, originally an 18 year old Spanish-speaking Colombian woman, had to do to improve her writing skills.  Now, imagine again that all that was accomplished over a period of 15 years.  It is clear that patience and determination are also two very important steps that have helped me to be where I am today in terms of improving my writing skills.