My writing

The Development of my Writing and Reading                                     Hannah Kim   To trace the development of my writing and reading, I have to start from the time when I was 1 year old. The reason is that it was when I started reading books. My mother says, she read numerous books for me since that period of time. She told me it was really surprising that I really enjoyed reading and also was good at memorizing stories. I always asked my mother to read books for me and sometimes did not go to sleep till 4 or 5 am. She was really surprised about this because she heard that kids usually fall in sleep when their parents read a book for them. But, it was not my case. Because I loved stories, I naturally started to read books all alone and finally, I was able to memorize all the interesting stories that I owned. It was such a huge satisfactory for me at that time.                When I was 5 years old, one of my friends stared to learn how to write Korean. Watching her, I really envied that, and my mother taught me how to write. However, it was just very simple words, such as dog, cat, Hannah Kim (which is my name). At that time, I also went to piano lesson and started to learn English. My mother said that after she taught me those simple words, one day, after the piano lesson, I read the letter from the piano teacher. This might be the first time I read the letter; I mean a long writing, not a word. At this period of time, I did not learn writing neither in Korean nor English. Although I started English at the age of 5, I did not put much effort because I was not so interested in learning languages. I was supposed to learn piano and flute and I planned to major in piano in the future. Therefore, I just read Korean story books and nothing more. However, things were changed when I was in the 7th grade.                When I was young, my parents did not even think of my studying. They thought because I am good at music, it is not likely that I am good at studying. In addition, I did not study mathematics or science that much like my friends did. However, when I went to middle school, my mother had me take an English examination held by a private institute. That institute was teaching students who wanted to go to foreign language high schools or international high schools. It was one of the most stressful experiences I have ever had because I was not ready at all. I just went to the institute to take the exam after my piano lesson. Although I did not know the most of the answers, I tried my best, and fortunately and surprisingly, I entered that exam and I was allowed to study in the foreign language high school preparation class. From this result, my parents realized that I can do a good job studying and decided to make me study. Therefore, I changed my future dream to go to foreign language high school from learning music.   However, studying was not so easy. Although I was so fortunate to begin my new life, learning difficult English, mathematics, and science, that luck did not continued. I had to face the uneasy fact that I had learned nothing compared to another students in the same class. Because of that, I started to spend much longer time and effort studying, especially English. From this period of time, my English reading improved dramatically. It was so natural because I spent most of my daily life reading and listening English. From this experience, there is one thing I realized though- reading and listening is a different thing. When I became to listen well, reading was still a trouble in my English. Sadly, I did not learn writing at this period of time, even though I learned and studied English very hard. All the questions that students are asked to solve when entering the foreign language high school, were all about reading and listening. There were no writings in the test. However, it does not mean that I do not have English writing experience at all.   When I started to study English really hard, I also had to prepare for TOEFL. And it contained essay writing. This was what I hated the most because I was afraid of writing. The reason was that I had no experience at all writing something in English. Furthermore, there are not so many opportunities to write an essay in Korean classes at school. I think this is the major reason I am afraid of writing. Because I did not write much, and learn much about writing, I was always uneasy about writing and scared of writing, and therefore, I tried to avoid the writing classes all the time. As a result, for my TOEFL writing, I began to memorize all the model essays that can get a high score from ETS. However, this activity was not so strange thing in Korea because almost everybody who prepares TOEFL undergoes this procedure. It is not related to personal writing ability at all- we had to do this just because we needed a high score in TOEFL, and learning the writing format was believed to be the best policy. With this experience, my image of writing became much worse, because not only being afraid of writing, it became even such a boring activity- no creation.   This is the development and history of my reading and writing. For reading, I enjoyed and enjoy doing it because I love to read novels. Reading in English is the same story because I am thrilled when I read English novels which are not translated in Korean. Experiencing the original authors' expressions and words is always interesting. However, in terms of writing, I should say that I do not like it. During my life, it is true that I always desired to learn how to write well. When I saw writers who wrote impressive books and best sellers, they were the ones who had my admiration. However, writing has been always my challenge. As I showed before, I have been always afraid of it. For one thing but the most important thing, expressing what I feel and what I want to write as much as I want was always an impossible thing for me. Then, after putting tons of effort to achieve this, I ended up being frustrated. In addition, what I always felt is that my grammar was terrible. Although I wanted to write in sophisticated way, my grammar has been always a barrier. There are always too many errors in my writing, and that also ends up my being frustrated and makes me give up and quit writing. In this class, I want to learn how to be comfortable when I have to write long essays, and how to deal with these. I want to be a good writer who can express all the things that I want to say and want the readers to feel.