Mingyu

This text relieved my anxiety about this course. I expected this course would mainly focus on the formal aspects of writing like structure, grammar and so on. As I’m not a native speaker, those things quite burdened me with a fear of ignorance that I’ve never felt. Of course, I can’t deny that those structural parts play an important role but this text gave me a hope for understanding the more fundamental and essential element of writing. That is “Reading the world as a text�. This shifted my paradigm completely. As a scientist, I have known, experienced, even practiced this sort of thing so much but I was not aware that what I did was reading and writing actually. The only difference between what I regarded as writing and science is the fact that I used just different signifiers like numbers, mathematical symbols. Another thing I overlooked is that writing is the process of shaping and refining our interpretations about the world. That’s the thing I realized exactly and so clearly by studying science. Occasionally, I meet with a new concept in a science class which seems to be apprehensible at once and then I feel like I understand it thoroughly. But soon I become to know that it is just a daydream when I try to solve some problems about the concept or to explain it to someone after class. Solving problems is no more than writing if I read the author’s intention correctly. With no exception, I don’t perceive clearly what I misunderstand or what questions I have until I solve problems or explain the unfamiliar concept to someone. Conventional writing also follows same process. While we are writing, our interpretations of the world become to be more organized, shaped, reasonable and logically explained not only to ourselves but also to publics. I don’t expect my poor even pathetic English will improve dramatically through this course, that’s my lifetime task, but I really hope by the end of this course I will be able to have my own framework or way of “reading the world� as the author promised.