sky147
Member
- Joined
- Aug 29, 2014
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- Turkish
- Home Country
- Turkey
- Current Location
- Turkey
Hello, everyone.
I'm doing major on American Studies, and it's hard to believe but I'm about to start my 3rd year. From the beginning, I'd had way too much issues with the usage of proper and contemporary English, so I worked hard to get over these obstacles. English isn't my native language, but I love to read in English, hence I dig in for more subjects related to language than just it's grammar, such as linguistics and etymology.
Even with all my enthusiasm on the matter, I can't seem to write literate sentences that would go along with the literary analyses. When I try to do everything right, my sentences become really simple and short. Since my former sentence is too short, I have to repeat the things I said in the beginning, mostly pronouns.
I've been working as a part-time ESL teacher for months, so I know what sentence types (simple, compound, complex) are. I, also, know how to merge sentences with noun/adjective/adverb clauses.
I've studied "the -so called- advance writing" books, but there've been no improvement since they aimed a lower level of writing than I. They help you to write a kind of essay an ESL student is expected to write. I must be able to write like a native, like I can read and analyse texts in English.
To cut long story short, what am I doing wrong? I'll quote one of my analysis essay's paragraph, and then, give an another example how I want my style to be.
One of my developmental paragraphs from the analysis assignment of The Road Not Taken
Some good examples of writing I've come across within the reference books:
I'm doing major on American Studies, and it's hard to believe but I'm about to start my 3rd year. From the beginning, I'd had way too much issues with the usage of proper and contemporary English, so I worked hard to get over these obstacles. English isn't my native language, but I love to read in English, hence I dig in for more subjects related to language than just it's grammar, such as linguistics and etymology.
Even with all my enthusiasm on the matter, I can't seem to write literate sentences that would go along with the literary analyses. When I try to do everything right, my sentences become really simple and short. Since my former sentence is too short, I have to repeat the things I said in the beginning, mostly pronouns.
I've been working as a part-time ESL teacher for months, so I know what sentence types (simple, compound, complex) are. I, also, know how to merge sentences with noun/adjective/adverb clauses.
I've studied "the -so called- advance writing" books, but there've been no improvement since they aimed a lower level of writing than I. They help you to write a kind of essay an ESL student is expected to write. I must be able to write like a native, like I can read and analyse texts in English.
To cut long story short, what am I doing wrong? I'll quote one of my analysis essay's paragraph, and then, give an another example how I want my style to be.
One of my developmental paragraphs from the analysis assignment of The Road Not Taken
Reading this, or any other essays I've written for the university, makes me feel like an ***** who has little or no education on the literary matters and devices. This paragraph doesn't contain half of the things I wanted to say back then. Somehow I ended up with repetition over pretty obvious things with my seemingly superficial approach to the poem.When the speaker tells us he wants to travel both without having one to choose
“Oh, I kept the first for another day!” (13),
his attitude change in the following lines,
“Yet knowing how way leads on to way/I doubted if I should ever come back” (14, 15)
after he comes to realization that it would not worth to travel both and the fallacy of having choices to make. Even if the traveler wants to think his choices makes great difference against other people and would tell them about his choices
“I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence:/And that has made all the difference.” (16, 17, 20).
The traveler realizes the road he has chosen is actually the road taken, because even the road not taken has already taken, and choosing that road would not make him someone with “better claim”.
Some good examples of writing I've come across within the reference books:
In this sense, one can think of literature less as some inherent quality or
set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing all the way from Beowulf
to Virginia Woolf, than as a number of ways in which people relate themselves
to writing. It would not be easy to isolate, from all that has been variously
called 'literature', some constant set of inherent features. In fact it would be
as impossible as trying to identify the single distinguishing feature which all
games have in common. There is no 'essence' of literature whatsoever.
The first of the chapters to focus upon social contexts for the poetry
is Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller’s “Feminism and the Female Poet,”
which gives a rich and detailed survey of women’s writing and of
the feminist issues to which it responds. Keller and Miller point out
how active women poets in the United States were in the birth of
modernism and how closely involved these same poets were with
social issues and gender politics.