Writing center reflection

           I went to writing center to find Mrs. Wrzosek. She read my first blog which was Ellen’s diary on Sep 1st. She did not say that I had any strength. After reading my diary, she told me the most important thing for was that I needed to be more realistic.

           Firstly,  I was pretending that I was Ellen who was an native American girl; it was hard to write because all the thing I wrote need to accord with American culture, and I am not an American, so all of the American cultures were differ to me. I needed to know more about American cultures before writing, if I want to do a good job. For example, in my diary, I wrote that Ellen’s parents prepared a big meal for her in order to celebrate the coming of her college life. Her mother cooked turkey, vegetables and apple pie. Mrs. Wrzosek told me that this meal was more likely to be the Thanksgiving meal. Actually, Americans families do not celebrate it like this. They are more likely to set a BBQ party. I finally realized that there were many this kind of mistakes in my writing, so there was a long way for me to go to correct all these errors.

           Secondly, the things which happened in my diary needed to fit my background setting. The whole things were happened in early 19th century, although there were not many foreigners in a country, they still knew how they looked like by reading books. It was true that the technology had not been well-developed, but people lived in that time already had a quite clear vision of the world they lived. I wrote that Ellen wondered how Sookan looked like in the first diary. “Golden hair? Blue eyes?” were not realistic. Mrs. Wrzosek said that Ellen probably wondered what food did Sookan eat, and did Sookan also eat hamburgers in Korea? Thousands of years ago, the nature already decided what people from different areas looked like; it because of the environment, climate and culture, so it was a kind of common sense or general knowledge for Ellen to know what did Asian people look like. 

           Thirdly, Mrs. Wrzosek said if it is hard for me to write as Ellen herself, I can create a new character who is from my country and come to America to study same as Sookan, but I think in Gathering of pearls, the author wanted to express that she was the only foreigner from Asia in her college, so all the things of which were different from Americans were very attractive for native students. Because of this I do not want to add another Asian students, so I think I probably will continue writing through Ellen’s vision, and I will pay more attention about the content and try my best to make it become more realistic. 

          Thanks Mrs. Wrzosek a lot. Now I probably know how to write this diary. I might want to cannel many of the plots which I already wrote down and add more things. There is not so much time left, so I need to work harder in order to finish my diary.