Archive for February, 2009

I’m preparing myself for a writing class that I have just registered.  After twelve years without taking any English writing class, I can see myself stumbling all the way through. Writing formally such as an essay doesn’t come easy anymore.  The class that I’m going to take is called, “Essay and Reserach”, which sounds scary already.  Taking a baby step by writing  just a simple memoir of my daily life might just be a good start.

“My daily life”

My daily life usually begins at 8 o’clock in the morning. After having made my bed and groomed myself, I walk to my kitchen and step on a scale to measure my weight.  A reason I measure myself everyday is to find out if the food I ate a day before has any impact on my body weigh.  If it has, I will try to stay away from the same kind of food or reduce the amount intake.

Standing in the middle of my kitchen is a small island , where a squared plastic Tupperware containing dry chicken food is lying. Grabbing a bag of salad, a large size of apple, and a cup of bean sprout, I begin to chop and add them into the Tupperware. Bean sprout contains enzymes that their bodies need from fresh vegetables. They like soupy food; therefore, I normally add a cup of water in order to make their food soft.  After their food is ready, I climb down a ladder to go down a basement to feed my chickens. It’s my habit of saying hello to them whether or not they understand me. Somehow I make an assumption that they do because they always respond with certain kinds of noise.  I can see them standing close to the door and looking through the chicken wires that divide between a large area of the basement and their quarter. They wait eagerly for their first meal of the day. Once in a while, I will find a white Lake Horn roosting on a hanging wire above me. With my encouragement, she flies down to join the rest of the flock, ready to eat her share. I also fill other feeders with a full cup of cracked corn and sun flower seeds. I also raise Guineas or African Pheasants. Both chickens and guinea are fully fed so it’s time for them to go out for a run in the yard. As soon as the basement door is cracked opened, they fly out like an arrow.  I walk toward the other side of the basement where a wood stove is located. Because the temperature is still below freezing, the basement feels rather cold. I cut a cardboard box into smaller pieces, put a small log in the stove, and crumble a couple of pieces of a newspaper before lighting the fire. My morning shore is done so I climb up the ladder and start to eat my own breakfast.

There is a connection between writing and thinking. Can writing be learned? In my opinion, it can; otherwise, a writing course wouldn’t have been offered to every first year college student. Learning to write effectively and efficiently requires a hard work, commitment, and perseverance.

Writing has wide-ranging implications for the way we think and learn, for our chances of success, our personal development, and our relations with other. Writing encourages us to be organized, logical, and even creative in our thinking; moreover, it urges us to ask question and to look critically at what other have to say as well as what ourselves think.

The grammatically of writing imposes a certain kind of order on our thinking. To write comprehensible sentences and paragraphs, we need to put words in a certain order: follow subjects with verbs, coordinate parallel ideas, and subordinate the particular to the general. From different kinds of writing, we learn different ways of developing our thoughts. . We learn to analyze and evaluate ideas and to synthesize what we learn from other and experiences firsthand. Writing fosters habits of critical inquiry.