My Writing Skills and How Writing Affects Me as an Individual

My Writing Career
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July 19, 2018
While some might consider writing as a mundane task of putting words into a sheet of paper, my journey has thought me that it is more than what it seems to be. Instead, I also knew that writing is a creative process, a way for the mind to express its most profound desires, learn new things, as well as craft a world that could change, not only his own but also those of his readers. Furthermore, in the pursuit of all of this, I realized throughout my experience that it also improves an individual throughout the experience. Thus, in this article, I would first lay out my skills as a writer in our class. After this, a deeper reflection of how it affects me as an individual would be done. Lastly, I would synthesize all of these ideas and look at how I’ve changed (both in writing and my personal life) after the whole class.
I started writing back when I was in grade school in our hometown in China. As I was growing up, I somehow enjoyed the whole process especially as our teacher let us write anything from poems to short stories. However, what I realized is that despite my inclination towards writing, doing it using our original language is different when I’m writing it in English. As Lahiri (2012) noted, when it comes to writing in a foreign tongue, “knowing — and learning to read in — a foreign tongue heightens and complicates my relationship to sentences.” In saying this, I’m not only referring to the rules of grammar, punctuation, and word choice. Instead, what I’m referring to is the way on how one utilizes his thought processes and immerses in the world of thoughts and ideas. For example, before taking this class, I wrote most of the time using Chinese. As I am doing so, I imagine focussing my thoughts on my childhood, my upbringing, our culture, and even the people whom I have known back in our hometown. As I took this class (and interacted with other people here), I started to think about the differences in culture, my experiences in this foreign land, as well as how the culture works in here as compared to before. In other words, what I’m trying to say is that throughout after this class, I did not only become better in writing in the English language but also more well-rounded in the culture and norms that underlie it.
Aside from having the ability to place my mind within the American culture, and somehow think like how an English writer would do, another benefit that this course has believed to me is how to become competent in both writ...