Writing : a self-fulfillment ( Laura )

My love for writing

A library in my own house, this is what I had the chance to have. Having parents who enjoy reading, books were put down everywhere in my house : bedrooms, living rooms, entrance, and even kitchen were full of books of various gender. I am the youngest child of my family, and strangely enough, the fact to see my parents and brother reading a lot when I was little catched up my attention. At five years old, as most of the children, I did not know how to read yet. However, I was observing members of my family who were keeping these books in their hands for hours. How can they stand so many time in front of a book? Why do they seem so attracted? I really wanted to know what all these books were about. I was scared to never get to my answers… Consequently, I learnt how to read at the early age of 6 years old. I used to read different kind of books, including fiction and article for children. During my junior high school years, I began to read the so-called French literature. I did not like all of them, and personally, I think that a young child of 12 years old can not understand the all and deep meaning of it. However, I read one that really touched me, and this is how I became aware of the beauty of the writing process. The name of the book is “Les Mots” (words) from Jean-Paul Sartre, a famous French author of the twentieth century. In this book, he is explaining how each word evokes something to him. In a certain way, he deciphers the French language, taking account the meaning of the words as well as their spelling. Jean-Paul Sartre was an incredible writer and he was very specific in the choices of the words. In my opinion, this is what makes his books so famous. This is the author who makes me realize how gorgeous was the writing process. Thanks to the good choice of words, a book can make the reader escape from his own life, and he can feel every existing feeling of this world : happiness, excitement, sadness, nostalgic and so forth.

To my mind, the main purpose of writing is to share ideas and feelings. However, it does not mean that it is easy to do. In addition, sometimes you have to respond to specific criteria or format, which makes the writing more difficult. For this reason, the writing I like the most is Journal writing. We are free to write whatever we want with unspecific format and we have no rules to follow. We can let our mind write without being stopped by fences.

Unfortunately, this is not what we did the most in this class. However, the essays we had to write helped me a lot in different ways. Mainly, I learnt how to organize my thoughts and how to explain to my reader by which step I wanted to go through in order to get to my own conclusion. “English Composition” Class is important for every single student and even more for international students. I became aware that writing is definitely the key to improve English. This is such a difficult process for international students, but this is how we can cover every point of the English language, including syntax, vocabulary or grammar. Finally, the most difficult part for us when we have to write an essay is that we are always tempted to translate from our own language. Here is the mistake. Translating our thoughts from our own language to English will make the essay weak and clumsy. The difficulty is to think in English. It involves much more focus, but I am convinced that this is the way to improve my English in order to write and speak this language as if it were my native language.