I know that writers here are writing 1000 Chinese words every day, which I have tried for less than three days. Two major problems are ahead of my Chinese writing. The lack of vocabs and sense of nature. These have challenged my English writing as well. However, it is necessary to write in English over 1000 words as frequently as possible. Everyone has to conduct several essays in U.S universities, while most of them are far more than 1000 words. If you have a plan to study abroad, I recommend to start practicing right now. Personally, I have not written anything for a long time, which reduced my ability in doing essays. In the U.S ACT writing test, I was always top 5% in the nation. Right now is different.
To write a fair article, there are a few suggestions that should follow. I have used them well in the past days, and this will remind me for a long time.
Never use first person or second person, including I, me, my, we, us, our, you, your. Personal feelings should be excluded as well, e.g. personally. These words normally decrease the reliability of your article.
Never use words from speaking. There are words that should not be in essays definitely. For example, "actually" is a word that I have seen a lot of people use in their essays. I would recommend use "in fact" or "in reality" instead. The traditional Chinese English education only teaches us the meaning of words, but never shows the difference when using them.
Abbreviation should be avoided. When you need to say "they're", please use "they are" instead. Typing one more letter and a space will not hurt you, but make the article more formal. In addition, please replace "can't" with "cannot" (no space between), "he'd" with "he would". The old way of English education confused speaking words with writing words. These are fine when speaking, but not formal when writing.
Stop repeating words. Your teachers must have told you to memorize replacement of words when writing. This will be a huge benefit if you listen to them. Change of topic, change of opinion, or change of anything should have different words in a paragraph (for a different paragraph, I do it fine for myself). There is also no reason to see word in similar meaning come out together. "A bright, gorgeous sun". What exactly are you trying to prove? These words are making readers confuse.
Capitalizations of "but", "because", "so", and "and" should be avoided. We have learned to write sentences like "Because xxx, he starts to xxx." There is no grammar mistakes in this sentence, but it will be a better to write in this way: he starts to xxx, because xxx. Please be careful that there is a comma in front of "because". Commonly, use "since", "for", "due to", "as" to introduce reasons is a wiser choice. The function of these word are connecting sentences, without a sentence before, what to connect?
The purpose of this collection (and this article) is to lead a writing in English on Jianshu. Not everyone has to write for 1000 words. As Chinese writing can clear and reshape human minds, practicing of English is the building process of a foreign mind. How could one person understand another culture if he cannot think in that way? Reading sample essays is one possible way. Since Google is fully blocked in China, Bing News may become the only way of reading English news. If you also want to practice English listening skills, I truly recommend CNN student news (have to go across the GFW of China). It is only ten minutes long each. The only TV show I recommend is Modern Family, which contains traditional American thoughts of living.
Back to the topic, if you want to practice your English writing skills, please upload your article to this collection. There is no limit of words, but please do not copy article from other sites! I will find out how much percent of the essay is plagiarized (So will the U.S. professors). If you have articles to reference, please remember to include them in APA or MLA formats. To learn more of APA and MLA, please visit Wikipedia (most professors prefer APA) or other websites. You can also use APA machines to automatically write references. Machine 1 & Machine 2 & Machine 3.
There is no limitation of topics. Prose fictions are welcomed here. Diaries are also good to share.
