| Some of you have spoken English for as long as you can remember. Some of youmay have learned to speak some other language, such as Spanish, Vietnamese, Farsi,Polish, Arabic, or Chinese, before you learned to speak English. But all of you haveone thing in common: for all of you written English is a kind of second language---aslightly unfamiliar territory. You may even be so uncomfortable with writtenEnglish that you try to avoid situations that force you to write. This book is designed to make you more comfortable using written Englishby presenting it as a distinct variety of English--a variety with certain rules thatdiffer from the rules we normally use when we speak. If you learn those rules, yourwriting will improve. You are going to learn those rules first by reading about them and, second, byusing them in your writing. You are already familiar with these two ways oflearning. For example, if you have learned to play a musical instrument, you knowthat understanding everything your teacher says is not enough to make you pro-ficient; you also have to learn how to feel what your teacher says. To use anotherexample, if you have learned how to play a sport, you know you can understandwhat your coach says, but you also have to learn how to feel what he or she says.And you learn how to feel it by practicing. You will be doing a lot of practicing in this course; specifically, you will bedoing a great deal of writing. At this point, you may be feeling a little worried aboutmaking mistakes when you write. You may even be getting rather tense andanxious about the red marks that might appear on your papers after your teacherreads what you have written. Let us pause briefly here to consider the subject of mistakes. We commonlymake at least three different kinds of mistakes: good, embarrassing, and dangerousones. Good mistakes are the kind people have to make in order to learn how to dosomething new. For example, when you are learning to play a musical instrument,you make lots of mistakes as you develop a feel for the things your teacher has toldyou. Those mistakes are an important part of the learning process because you learnfrom them. Similarly, when you are learning to play a sport, you make manymistakes as you develop a.feel for the things your coach has told you about, such |
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