It gets really frustrating when one thinks one manages a knowledge, and then one comes to realize it’s not true. Sometimes we are sure we had mastered something easily, and we continue to believe it for some time, but then we realize we had been wrong and it frustrates us. Is that one’s fault?
Whether it is or not, it’s always good to realize one’s mistakes; it happened to me last week. I have been studying English for more than 3 years now, and being at the University, I thought I had managed the language really well for a Spanish speaking person. For all this time I have practiced grammar and oral communication, and to my teachers’ eyes I’m really good at that. However, I had never tried to write a well structured essay or any official paper like that.
As a result, I was not prepared at all to do an essay. In spite of that, I was supposed to do a well structured essay last week. I believed I could do it, since I had no problems with vocabulary or grammar, but I was wrong. We had a 30 minutes space to do the 350 words essay; I wrote 430 and was happy because of that. Eventually the teacher came to read my essay, and everything was blow away: I had 2 problems. First of all, I lost the point of the essay, and started to write about something else -related, but different-. Then the structure problem came in; topic sentence, controlling idea, supporting ideas, all of that was missing, and thus my essay was not well structured.
At the beginning I felt completely frustrated and depressed, but then the teacher offered to explain it to me, and to give me practices so I could get better writing. Right now I’m working on another essay, and I have to say I feel happy. As I mentioned before, it’s really nice to realize one’s mistakes, and to learn how to correct them. I know it’s not going to be easy, but you can’t accomplish something if you don’t start to work on it.
