During our learning period of a foreign language, and here I do not necessarily mean only English, we are asked to write essays. Learners are generally uncomfortable with this, since writing hundreds of words in a language different from their own is, let's face it, scary! In this brief guide, I will attempt to cover (and uncover!) the Hungarian students most typical errors and later, in an other article, offer possible solutions to these errors.Because the English language works very differently than the Hungarian, (or let's allow ourselves a touch of pride: Hungarian works differently than English), a lot of formulas and solutions that would be perfectly acceptable in a home-written essay simply fail in a British-American academic context.
The first and foremost thing I need to mention is planning. Sometimes called brainstorming, or drafting, or pre-writing, or sketching; what it really means is collecting the ideas, key points and sub-topics you want to write about. To be perfectly honest, I never saw a Hungarian student pre-plan the essay that he/she needed to hand in. What we tend to do is start off and randomly stitch together units of thoughts that are in our heads. This might as well result in a successful, easily readable and well made essay, but probably will not.
Do your planning before you start writing! If you type, use a separate document [for example, I use WordPad for planning and Word for writing the actual text], or if the essay has to be handwritten, take another piece of paper and help yourself with a list of ideas. A good outline or plan could look like this.
Title: Dolphins are being eaten in Russia
Intro:
a.) 600.000 dolphins are eaten each year.
b.) People don’t mind.
c.) Greenpeace recently protested against this.
Body:
a.) the dolphin population in Russia
b.) the food situation in the north [1. no food, 2. difficult to deliver 3. nutrition needs for bad weather] c.) the advantages of dolphin meat
d.) the moral side – are dolphins sacred?
e.) my opinion [1. from my desk 2. if I’d be there]
Conclusion:
a.) This and this happened
b.) possible future
c.) what we can do to help
Again, a typical mistake would be to introduce your writing falsely by composing an irrelevant body to an introduction. Sometimes we tend to write a very different essay than what the first paragraph would have promised. This might sound silly or awkward, but in my experience, a lot of people fall into this error! If this is the case with your essay, don’t be shy, go back and modify your intro.
By this time, I'm sure you have observed that this guide is working with paragraphs instead of one big chunk of text. Why? Practical reasons! In Hungarian writing, we use indented lines to separate different units of the text. This isn't a useless idea, but the English way seems to be more effective: one point or sub-topic; one paragraph. This comes very handy when you need to search an essay for a specific piece of information like a figure or a name. Also, your reader will be more comfortable when dealing with your writing: the text doesn’t look unbeatable this way. Keep in mind: a well-paragraphed essay is much easier to read.
We sometimes forget about the dimensions and go way out of proportion. If an essay is well controlled, it means that the body text is not stupidly long compared to the introduction or the conclusion. This, of course, stands the other way around too: having a page of intro, six sentences of main body and another three pages of conclusion is not a very good idea. A well controlled essay looks like this (according to academic level books on writing techniques); 3 sentences of introduction, 3 times 3 sentences as text body (three paragraphs, obviously) and 3-4 sentences of conclusion. This can be a nice pattern to follow, but don’t fall into the trap of *droidism: this is a guideline, not a golden rule!
Another typical mistake Hungarian learners make is building sentences either too short or incredibly long. Depending on your topic, the level of your English, the requirements of being formal and other factors, you need to select your words carefully and not over-do, or under-do their length. If you are writing a composition about how your dog sleeps, nobody expects heavy compounds of clauses. A sentence like “He rarely barks.” would be adequate, even though it is not a complete S.V.O.M.P.T. compound. Yet, if you need to hand in an essay on how modern education reacted to the appearance of spell-check software, you probably should go for sentences like “Though at present day, having a text spell-checked by a software (or software-element) instead of critical proof-reading isn’t considered cheating, some secondary school teachers disprove of such means of pre-academic progress and urge their students not to fully rely on the computer.”
In schools, essays in English usually have a word-count. This is a number that gives the writer some boundaries. A typical high school task would be to write an essay on George Washington’s political career. A reasonable word-count for such a task easily could be 500 words. This would roughly be two pages of neatly typed text. In other cases, for example when writing letters, the target number of words can be as low as eighty. This means that the writer must not “overwrite” the letter: only relevant information and facts should be put on the paper. Perhaps needless to say, but just to make sure, we need to clarify the following: an “underwritten” piece of text that doesn’t reach the 90% of the word count probably will not be accepted or will fail when assessed. Then again, a student that writes more than 110% of the word count may lose points, since he/ she was not able to finish the writing in the expected length.
If the writer wants to organize the essay’s main points, he/she might want to refer to the pre-planned version or the draft. This is a good idea because the writer can follow the guideline that he/she devised and can produce a piece of writing that is well structured and neatly formatted, yet original and authentic. One danger lurks in the dark however.
Using bullet points on a list, or draft, or plan is perfect; there probably isn’t a more effective way to organize your thoughts. Be careful though: never use bullet points in an essay! Since you are producing a coherent, well-built, quality piece of writing, the fact that you used bullet points ruins the quality of the paper. Totally.
When working with clusters of ideas, students often fail to count their paragraphs or topics. A good bad-example: in the introduction, the writer says “Hybrid cars in mass-production can be categorized into three utterly different classes: two-seaters, one-spacers, multi-seat buses, and utility vehicles.”
As you can clearly see, the writer miscounted the number of categories, and had forecasted a smaller number of topics than what will eventually be discussed. Mistakes such as these can bring serious negative score upon your essay.
As for a final hint, let me emphasize proof-reading. No matter how professional you are, how good the spell-check aid in your software is and how many essays you have written before, you will make mistakes. We all do. And there is no problem with that. Re-reading your essays at least once after finishing is vital if you want it to be successful. No doubt, a second or third re-read again improves the quality and filters out little problems, but for some, it is not essential.
When we, the learners of a foreign language are building our essays, the time spent “together” makes us more tolerant of its weaknesses. We tend to accept its faults and mess-ups and not be critical with the way it works. However, when somebody else will read the same piece of writing, the mistakes will be obvious and will not be looked over or forgiven; the somebody will judge the paper (and us!) based on what he/she sees. During your last proof-reading, try to imagine that you are holding someone else’s work and be critical with it. If looked over with a keen eye, mistakes will show themselves and after correction, the essay will be sound and healthy. And one final piece of advice: enjoy your writing!
Nincsenek megjegyzések:
Megjegyzés küldése