Oh Ga-yeong 201202029/What's important to get writing right?/Thursday 1:00-3:00 p.m.

Slow and Steady Wins The Race             William Zinsser said that writing is one of the hardest things that people do. Most of the students who are learning writing skills will totally agree with this. I also think that it takes a lot of time and effort to become a better writer. Maybe reading stack of books can also play an important role in writing skills but that's not all. From when I was in the middle school and until now, I have had difficulties in writing but I found three important points which should be followed. To become a good writer, we have to focus on these three things: revising as many times as possible, the amount of writing, and the draft or rough outline before starting to write an entire essay.      After finishing writing, we need to revise a thousand times what we have written because there can be typing mistakes or the error of word spacing and so on. Small mistakes can distract the readers and make them disappointed so we have to revise as much as we can. However, revising also takes a lot of effort and the basic knowledge about writing is necessary. So when we revise, if we are confused whether the words that we have chosen are correct or not, we have to do whatever we can. We can borrow related reading materials from the school library or search the internet but the internet contains a lot of wrong information so we should sort good facts. Revising many times can make us tired of but I think that this can also give us the chance to become a better writer. I believe that the effort which have been put in will not betray us.      The next important step to become a better writer is writing large amounts. Napoleon Hill said that strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle. Even though we want to be a good writer, if we don't do our best, we cannot achieve our goals. Of course, most of the students will agree that writing is tiring job. However, I think that we have to enjoy it if we cannot avoid writing. By admitting that writing is tiring and difficult job and by deciding to enjoy it, now we are ready to write large amounts. If you don't want to write about something serious, then you can start from writing about trivial things. For example, you can write about yourself or your family, what you like and what you dislike. You can start from these minor subjects and if you think that your writing skills have improved, then you can challenge to more serious subjects. Like this, you don't have to cling to the subjects. The point is increasing the amount of writing.      The last but the most important that we have to focus on is writing the first draft. There is no person who writes perfectly without no plan. We have to set up our plan in advance so that we don't miss the point and get out of our topic. In case of the short essays or writing about simple subjects, maybe we can just write down whatever we want to say following our instinct. However, if we are faced with more long essays, there is a high possibility that we lose our direction and say something which is not related to the topic. So we have to always set up the plan and then we can start to write following the major points that we made.      These three things that I mentioned above can be seen too basic and abstract but I think that there is no skill that we can become a perfect writer in a second. It takes a lot of time and effort. At least, if we know these points that we have to focus on to become a better writer, we are supposed to devote our time in writing. It means that we put our effort in and there is a high possibility that we become a better writer because effort doesn't betray us.