DJ TP #6

Yesterday I met with Abdullah after I watched the movie with the other two. We went over his essay that I helped him write the previous week. He wrote an essay describing his favorite sport, volleyball. He had never studied the American style essay so we wrote it out together, sentence by sentence. I remember how strange I thought it was when we watched the video clip in class that showed all the different styles of essay. To me, the American style seems to be the only logical way to present your point. We went over his essay, which I had asked him to review himself and check for errors. He found about 50% of them, mostly simple spelling mistakes, but there were also a few things like capitalization and punctuation. Then we went back through and I tried to explain to him that the essay is to repetitive. This concept was hard for him to understand, because everything he had written was essentially exactly what I had told him to write. So I had to explain that what I gave him was the bare minimum for an essay, and that even though it got his point across, it didn't do it very well. Obviously, this is the hardest part of writing in English: it is hard enough to write an essay in a language you don't understand, but to then also have to worry about style? But I explained to him the main way to make an essay sound better: varied speech. Which is to say, using different words to say the same thing.