Assignment

The focus of this assignment is your development as a writer—in both your native and second or foreign language(s). Consider your entire life, including pre-school years, and do not limit yourself to school experiences. Some areas of your experience you might want to consider include: people who have influenced your writing, your memories of successes and failures in writing, your feelings about writing (whether it is easy or difficult for you and why), and your strengths and weaknesses in writing. You do not need to write about all of or only these areas nor follow this order in your paper. The purpose of thinking about these topics is to help you recover and arrange relevant memories. Please note that although the assignment asks you to focus on your writing history, you might have to include certain experiences that do not explicitly relate to writing but provide a context for those experiences.

Memoirs are usually not argumentative and do not require a thesis/argument or research (although you may structure your autobiography around an argument if you wish). Memoirs are often structured around an encounter with an obstacle or complication and the lessons learned from that confrontation/encounter. Including details is vital. 

I need you to fix this essay according to the comments but still use the personal information in the attachment. And I was host in a american family and it changes me a lot, you can try to add this part in the essay, and do whatever you can to make is 900 words

The comments from the instructor is :” To that end, you will need to heavily revise this first draft. I need to hear more about the process of learning how to       write in both languages. Consider any  struggles and successes you experienced   in each of these languages. Are they the same struggles/successes or different? Do you approach writing in one language differently than the other, or do you take the same approach? What have you learned about writing in each of these languages? And, most importantly, what exactly does writing mean to you now? “

Zhao1

Pan Zhao

Engl 106i

Jan 20th 2020

Autobiography (first draft)

I am a Chinese national. I was born in Shanghai, China 21 years ago. I studied in shanghai until 9th grade and then moved to Los Angeles, California where I enrolled in high school before moving to another shortly afterward. The first was catholic affiliated; the second one was also Christian based. I graduated from high school. I am now seeking an opportunity to pursue an undergrad in Sales Management at Purdue; while I would like to pursue a major in sales management, I would not say with finality that it’s the course I will settle for. I am still scouting. I have a couple of options that I also like. I will settle on one in due course. Aside from being enthusiastic about academics, I also have hobbies; the things I like doing during my free time. Oftentimes, I play basketball, work out, follow the stock market, and play video games in my free time. I come from a loving family. My father was a college professor; he is now a businessman. My mother was once a high school teacher. She is now a CEO in of education outfit.

Aside from my background. I would also like to share my life experiences here in the US. In this biography, I explore the good, the bad and the ugly in relation to the experiences I have faced during my stay in Los Angeles. First off, I would like to indicate that my formative years were spent in a completely different culture. So, I was socialized differently relative to most of the people I interacted with in high school. I moved from a collectivistic cultural orientation into a completely different setup. My upbringing impacted my level of class connectedness; I was passive in class. I also grappled with loneliness for a considerable amount of time. Most of the students I interacted with during my high school years were somewhat language proficient; I, however, grappled with perceived language incompetence; my friends were outspoken; they responded freely to questions raised by teachers.

Also, I would say that the collision between the Chinese and the American cultures somehow impeded the extent to which I could realize socio-cultural adjustments. I, from time to time, entertained the thoughts that my cultural predisposition was somewhat inferior. These thoughts made me overly self-conscious and bled into my classroom participation. While this was a challenge in my freshman and sophomore years, I was lucky enough to have good friends by my side by the time I transitioned to junior. This company provided the needed support and entrenched a sense of belonging in me in ways that encouraged me to interact more with others and to learn from them as well. Looking back, I would say that I have come a long way. I converse freely with people these days; I am more proactive now than I was when I first got to Los Angeles. It took me a lot of reading, talking to people in attempts to get off my comfort zone and I succeeded.

My woes, however, did not stop with the challenges in school; my initial weeks in the US were also marked by dietary challenges. I harbored misgivings about food which compounded my already unpleasant experience in the US; I would say, overall, my stay in LA and school life at the outset was a nightmare. I was exposed to the kind of food that I was not used to n Shanghai. While I did experience such a challenge at the beginning of my sojourn here in the US, I do not experience them as much. I am more acclimatized now and I enjoy my stay here.