Wed Jul 12, 2006 10:22 am TOEFL essay sample: In the late times of 19 century, when... |
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. Hello, FangFang. You have a very good imagination, and an eagerness to communicate that makes me confident that you will soon be a very good English user.
The main trouble with your essay is that you have tried to say too much, and have not spent enough time proofreading and checking your vocabulary and sentence structure. The result is an essay with many very strong images, but with unclear organization and many small mistakes that will give you a lower score.
I will underline some of the problems in the first paragraphs, and give comments about them in the brackets that follow:
In the late times of 19 century [awkward: 'in the late 19th century'],when Brother Lumi?re played their [wrong pronoun; you mentioned only one brother] first film in Paris they [uncertain reference: who is this 'they'?] might have expected a new era's coming.With the birth of current films,movies [leave two blank spaces after a period and one space after a comma] have become one [you are not counting; use 'a'] part of our daily lives. In the movie world , Charle [spelling] Chaplin ,as the tramp, lived terribly ,though hard it was the vagabon [spelling] still found his happiness and love;where Dorothy led us to her colorful fairy world ,golden roads ,Scarecrow talked like man,Lion and Tin Man as well [syntax is completely missing in this underlined part!],you can find wonders everywhere! By moive [spelling] Asoka was shaped into a vivid historical figure,who experienced a life from a tyrant to a wise king,and finally preached Buddhism around India.Also it was by [wrong preposition: 'through'] documentary films that we know the past ,such as ,great Egyptian Culture , lost Mya [spelling] Civilization, cruel World Wars, mesterious [spelling] universe origin......
These images (from 'In the movie world...' to '...universe origin') are very well-selected, strong and vivid examples, but the sentence structure uniting these clauses is irregular, the composition and punctuation is not careful, and therefore the passage is difficult to understand. In your rush to write everything down, you have sacrificed clarity and good writing. It would be better to save some time by using fewer examples and spend that time instead on polishing the mechanics of your sentences. This applies generally to the rest of your essay also. . _________________ Canadian-American native speaker who teaches English for a living at Mister Micawber's ESL cafe: Interview with Mister Micawber |
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Mister Micawber Moderator

Joined: 17 Jul 2005 Posts: 3791 Location: Yokohama, Japan
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