Topic A. (required)
Write an essay in which you tell us about someone who has made an impact on your life and explain how and why this person is important to you.
“Who is the person that impacts your life most?” [Starting with a question addressed to the reader sets up this sort of relationship: Comparing your person to the reader's person. It's not wrong, but it does shift the focus away from the point of the essay: you and your mother.] I [am] sure that you have ever heard this question once in your life. It can be neither easy nor hard for you to answer it, but for me, I always say: “My mom”.
My mom doesn’t affect me by the ideal model for my life, but she is really an ideal mom in my eyes. [What does 'ideal model for my life' mean? Why not? You should distinguish between the role model for a lifestyle and the role model for a mother.] Every moment in my life, she is always adjacent to me; from I went to nursery school to now. She joins every parents meeting of mine. In the summer, she takes me to travel, go to the beach, and watch children plays. She goes to bookstore with me, and chooses books for me. Not only that, she also teaches me how to live rightly, the way how do I stand up after each failure, [how to stand up after a failure] and never stop dreaming, pursuing the goal of my life. To bring this happy life for me, this is a great sacrifice of my mom.
My mom had a very hard life. She was born into a poor family with four siblings. When she was twelve, she had to stop her education because my grandparent couldn’t afford to pay for their children going to school. From then, her life became black. She spent her days delivering food, washing dishes, and cleaning up the floor; however, my mom did not accept that. She took classes at a center to achieve her high school diploma. Then she went to college and became a librarian at a junior high school in my hometown. To reach this achievement wasn’t easy for her. She had to pay for her education. Every day, she rode by bicycle five kilometers to go to school. After that, she helped my grandparents clean their small food store and prepare for the next selling day. Her day ended at eight o’clock. I knew my mom spent too much effort to get a peaceful life.
The story of my mom’s life is an enormous motivation for me. [You say that she is your ideal mother. Logically, your essay should then be about what you admire about her role as a mother. However, rather than discuss her life as mother, you discuss her life outside of this role. Now this implies there is something about her life as whole that you admire rather than what she does for you as a mother.
] [One of the ways to solve this problem is to explain when YOU were born. It would make much more sense to be speaking of these events if while she was doing all of these things, she was also taking care of you.] It helps me try my best to overcome the failures or challenges in my life. A couple of times, I felt feeble and exhausted when facing the difficulties in life. That was the meantime when I wanted to give up all. But I thought about my mom; I imagined what she went through in her life, what she did for me, and I encouraged myself to continue going forward.
Since my birth until now, my hardest time is when I left Vietnam to come to America. It was so terrible in the first period. I remember my first day at Rider High School that is the awful day. I cried too much after school. I feel abandoned, isolated, and lonely. I missed my Dad and my friends in Vietnam. I told my mom: “I don’t like this school. I want to go back to Vietnam”. At that time, my mom hugged me and solaced me: “It’s just the first day, my dear. I know you can do that. You like studying abroad. Let stand up and go on.”
What my mom said awakened me. My only difficulty was learning English. I had to try to learn it so that I could communicate with everyone, and integrate the new life. I stared practicing English everyday, doing homework, reading, trying to listen and write essay. I did everything I could; I went quite long way with a bit success. I can hear and talk with everybody better now. My learning is stable. A surprised thing is [You are speaking of the past and so you should use past tense. Fixed, it should be: "A surprising thing WAS..."] I passed the TAKS test on my first try one month after I came America. It makes me feel more confident.
I truly appreciate my mom so much because of staying next to me when I neither succeed nor fail. [This is an example of ambiguity. The use of the 'neither....nor' combination is a case of: I did not [blank] and I did not [blank]. So in reading this sentence I think: You never succeed and you never fail. And that is a contradiction. So, the way to fix this is to say: "...I whether succeeded or failed" to state that your mother is supporting you REGARDLESS of your successes or failures.] My mom brings to me the incentive, the confidence, and the persistence so that I can deal with this thorny life firmly. I only say that I love you too much, Mom. But my sentiments I give you is greater than the word “love”.
I can clearly tell what ideas you are trying to convey. And what issues I had with it have been articulated in the notes. The main obstacle in this essay is natural flow and logical organization. Fix that, and you’ll be good to go.
There are several sentence constructions that are awkward, ie. do not flow naturally. There are also several instances of confused tense usage – ie. past, present and future mingling together in the same paragraph, sentence, etc. Being able to determine the difference between what sounds natural and what does not is a matter of reading it out loud. This skill is developed over time so, for you, the best way to make your essay sound natural is to find someone with whom you can read you essay out loud and have them tell you what sounds natural and what does not. This way, you can learn as you go along what sentence constructions flow naturally rather than awkwardly. Often, the longer a sentence is, the greater the danger that it will sound unnatural. If your sentences are getting unnecessarily long, stop, read it out loud to someone to check, before moving on.
Write an essay in which you tell us about someone who has made an impact on your life and explain how and why this person is important to you.
“Who is the person that impacts your life most?” [Starting with a question addressed to the reader sets up this sort of relationship: Comparing your person to the reader's person. It's not wrong, but it does shift the focus away from the point of the essay: you and your mother.] I [am] sure that you have ever heard this question once in your life. It can be neither easy nor hard for you to answer it, but for me, I always say: “My mom”.
My mom doesn’t affect me by the ideal model for my life, but she is really an ideal mom in my eyes. [What does 'ideal model for my life' mean? Why not? You should distinguish between the role model for a lifestyle and the role model for a mother.] Every moment in my life, she is always adjacent to me; from I went to nursery school to now. She joins every parents meeting of mine. In the summer, she takes me to travel, go to the beach, and watch children plays. She goes to bookstore with me, and chooses books for me. Not only that, she also teaches me how to live rightly, the way how do I stand up after each failure, [how to stand up after a failure] and never stop dreaming, pursuing the goal of my life. To bring this happy life for me, this is a great sacrifice of my mom.
My mom had a very hard life. She was born into a poor family with four siblings. When she was twelve, she had to stop her education because my grandparent couldn’t afford to pay for their children going to school. From then, her life became black. She spent her days delivering food, washing dishes, and cleaning up the floor; however, my mom did not accept that. She took classes at a center to achieve her high school diploma. Then she went to college and became a librarian at a junior high school in my hometown. To reach this achievement wasn’t easy for her. She had to pay for her education. Every day, she rode by bicycle five kilometers to go to school. After that, she helped my grandparents clean their small food store and prepare for the next selling day. Her day ended at eight o’clock. I knew my mom spent too much effort to get a peaceful life.
The story of my mom’s life is an enormous motivation for me. [You say that she is your ideal mother. Logically, your essay should then be about what you admire about her role as a mother. However, rather than discuss her life as mother, you discuss her life outside of this role. Now this implies there is something about her life as whole that you admire rather than what she does for you as a mother.
] [One of the ways to solve this problem is to explain when YOU were born. It would make much more sense to be speaking of these events if while she was doing all of these things, she was also taking care of you.] It helps me try my best to overcome the failures or challenges in my life. A couple of times, I felt feeble and exhausted when facing the difficulties in life. That was the meantime when I wanted to give up all. But I thought about my mom; I imagined what she went through in her life, what she did for me, and I encouraged myself to continue going forward.
Since my birth until now, my hardest time is when I left Vietnam to come to America. It was so terrible in the first period. I remember my first day at Rider High School that is the awful day. I cried too much after school. I feel abandoned, isolated, and lonely. I missed my Dad and my friends in Vietnam. I told my mom: “I don’t like this school. I want to go back to Vietnam”. At that time, my mom hugged me and solaced me: “It’s just the first day, my dear. I know you can do that. You like studying abroad. Let stand up and go on.”
What my mom said awakened me. My only difficulty was learning English. I had to try to learn it so that I could communicate with everyone, and integrate the new life. I stared practicing English everyday, doing homework, reading, trying to listen and write essay. I did everything I could; I went quite long way with a bit success. I can hear and talk with everybody better now. My learning is stable. A surprised thing is [You are speaking of the past and so you should use past tense. Fixed, it should be: "A surprising thing WAS..."] I passed the TAKS test on my first try one month after I came America. It makes me feel more confident.
I truly appreciate my mom so much because of staying next to me when I neither succeed nor fail. [This is an example of ambiguity. The use of the 'neither....nor' combination is a case of: I did not [blank] and I did not [blank]. So in reading this sentence I think: You never succeed and you never fail. And that is a contradiction. So, the way to fix this is to say: "...I whether succeeded or failed" to state that your mother is supporting you REGARDLESS of your successes or failures.] My mom brings to me the incentive, the confidence, and the persistence so that I can deal with this thorny life firmly. I only say that I love you too much, Mom. But my sentiments I give you is greater than the word “love”.
I can clearly tell what ideas you are trying to convey. And what issues I had with it have been articulated in the notes. The main obstacle in this essay is natural flow and logical organization. Fix that, and you’ll be good to go.
There are several sentence constructions that are awkward, ie. do not flow naturally. There are also several instances of confused tense usage – ie. past, present and future mingling together in the same paragraph, sentence, etc. Being able to determine the difference between what sounds natural and what does not is a matter of reading it out loud. This skill is developed over time so, for you, the best way to make your essay sound natural is to find someone with whom you can read you essay out loud and have them tell you what sounds natural and what does not. This way, you can learn as you go along what sentence constructions flow naturally rather than awkwardly. Often, the longer a sentence is, the greater the danger that it will sound unnatural. If your sentences are getting unnecessarily long, stop, read it out loud to someone to check, before moving on.