I would say that I don't have a lot of writing experiences, especially in English because I just moved to America from South Korea. Even though I have taken two college writing courses at the previous school, I still feel that I need to improve my writing skills. Whenever I received my essay from an English instructor, I could see a lot of question marks on my paper because the instructor couldn't understand what I was trying to say. I believe that there are several reasons why writing is hard for me.
First of all, I still tend to think in Korean. If a topic is assigned to me, I try to think in Korean and then translate it in English. This is why it takes me hours to write when other students write half an hour. During my translating process in my mind, I incline to think in a simple way because a simple sentence is easy to translate in English. As a reference, English and Korean have different sentence structures. However, this simple sentence doesn't explain fully what I was initially intending to express. Through two college writing courses, I practiced to think in English and write right away. It helped me to save my time in writing, but still my sentences are too simple. Sometimes I am angry about what I have written because I feel that I am writing like a junior high school student. .
Another problem that I have is that I spend too much time in deciding what to write. For the most of time, I tend to look for a topic that may not need difficult vocabulary because my vocabulary is limited. I know that if I start with the topic in which I don't have enough vocabulary, I can't make progress in writing because of my lack of vocabulary. When I was taking a college writing course, I asked my professor regarding my lack of vocabulary. The professor suggested that I could express what I wanted to say as much as possible in my way and come back to those sentences and change it with more college level vocabulary from English dictionary.
