Blog 4

Blog4

Nina Yang

10/04/2014

W&C III

Ms. Guarino

    As an international student, there might be some common grammar problems in my writing and these kinds of problems are also common to see in other writers’ writing. Many problems are easy to find out after we read carefully about what we wrote. However, it’s hard to avoid these problems happen because of our careless during the process of writing.

    One of the common problems is about tenses. Especially the tenses agreements in an essay and what kind of tenses should we use in an essay. For example, in my previous essay, which was to write a story behind the painting we chose. The tenses I used in the story should be past tense since it was a story that happened in that past. Therefore, all the tenses in that story should be past tense but I wrote “He quickly falls in love with her as the moment he met her.” Which was wrong in it’s tense. The correct sentence should be “He quickly fell in love with her as the moment he met her.” Also, since all the tenses in this story were in past tense, the sentence “Then, Van Gogh draw a painting for Dr. Gachet.”Should follow the tense agreement in this story. It should be “Then, Van Gogh drew a painting for Dr. Gachet.”Since it was happened in the past. Throughout the year in this class, I’m going to choose to write in different kinds of writing, which are in diverse tenses to practice the skill in using different types of tenses in writing. In addition, I’m going to pay more attention to the tenses when I’m writing an essay. I’m also going to read again after finishing writing my essays to make sure there is no grammar mistake especially tenses mistakes.

    The other common problem is article problems in writing. Articles are what we put in front of nouns to definite them. We use different articles according to the quantity of the noun. We might also not use an article, for example, “we are going to eat dinner together.” There is no article before dinner because there is no article needed before the names of meals. Besides, there is no article before a noun followed by a categorizing letter or number. Also, we need to pay attention to the initial of the noun after the article when using the article. When there is a vowel in the initial of the noun after the article, we have to use “an” instead of “a”. For example, when I’m writing, “There is an apple in front of her.” I should “an apple” instead of  “a apple” since a, e, i, o, and u are all vowels. I’m going to pay attention when using articles since not all nouns need an article before them. In addition, I’m going to check all over when I’m finish writing an essay.

    Grammar problems are serious problem in writing, but we can stop making all those problems by being more careful when writing an essay. Besides, we can practice more in grammar because practice makes perfect.