UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO GRANDE – FURG

INSTITUTO DE LETRAS E ARTES – ILA

LÍNGUA INGLESA VIII
FLÁVIA GIACCOBO RIBEIRO – 109324
SEMANA 01

 Do you like writing? Why/why not?

 Do you remember when you started to write?
 Did you have any difficulties?
 How did you deal with them?
 What do you think you need to do to improve your writing?

THE WRITING EXPERIENCE IN MY LIFE

During all my life, I have had a great account of encouragement for my connection
with reading and writing. Since I have memory of my life, a loved uncle of mine calls me
writer and I do not even remember why he thought that it had something to do with me.
Anyway, I believed him, and it entered my mind that I had some intimacy with writing and
reading. Every single time that I was going to see this uncle, I would create something to give
him as a gift, and it was always something written, like a silly. This is a good story that opens
my contact with writing.

This treatment of him made me a confident writer in primary school, I believed in him
when he said I knew how to write good texts. Of course, as the years passed by, my
confidence was not so resistant. And when I was at secondary school, I had some problems
when dealing with a language teacher not so inspiring. This teacher asked us, on our seventh
grade, to write about a dream. I was very coherent with what I became when an adult, by
writing about a dream of getting to know other cultures and countries. I remember, clearly, of
mentioning that I would like to see snow because of some movie I have watched. As a
feedback of our tasks, the teacher told our parents that our texts were sad and that we did not
have dreams. After all the dedication I had put into that text, this made me discouraged to
write.

Some years later, in my next school, a teacher that was very passionate about Machado
de Assis enchanted me. That new language teacher would propose what we call “ditados”
with some words that was rare in our vocabularies. She would bring words like “soçobrar”
and also my new trauma, the word “exceção”. This story is kind of funny, because I would
take a 9 in every ditado, I only missed “exceção” in every single test for one year. I would get
home and tell my mother about it and she got so upset with me, because it was always the
same word! On my fifth turn making the same mistake on a test, she got my face onto her two
hands in front of her face and spoke firmly and slowly the words “EXCEÇÃO NÃO TEM S”.
Since that day, I never made that mistake again. I am certain those episodes of my life were
necessary for me to study language as an adult.

I hope this course makes us confident to follow with our professional lives as English
teachers and as English researchers. For both of these occupations, we will have to be great
writers and for this we have to be sure of what we are writing. Thus, I expect to be confident
when writing an academic or a not academic paper, to feel comfortable when I need to
express my opinions and feelings. If I could order ask for something extra, I would like to
study more about grammar, I believe it would be helpful for our main goal and I think this is a
golden chance since it is our last year of our academic English studies and I feel like it could
be a lack of our group. For conclude, I am excited for having class with this group a last
semester, even on remote mode and I hope we all have a great time by working together a last
time.