Series of English Skill (Part 3 – April 11, 2023)
The Series of English Skills part 3 continued to discuss writing an essay “sentences about you”. Learning to write an essay about ourselves will be very beneficial for us who will continue our education to the master level or to apply for higher education scholarships, because this is usually required. To write about ourselves we should create a list of questions, brainstorm our answers, make our answers as specific as possible, write from our perspective and double-check our essay. Our essay should consist of paragraphs that answer a list of questions: 1). name, 2). origin, 3). goals, 4). motivation and 5). experience.
In the beginning of our essay, we focus on ourselves, our name and our personality. Personality adjectives can be written as a quality or a flaw (defect). Qualities show good aspects of a person, such as creative, easy going, hard-working, helpful, outgoing, funny, smart/ intelligent. On the other hand, flaws (defects) show bad aspects of a person, such as being lazy, clumsy, rude/ impolite, stubborn, jealous, messy and conceited. Next, we can write about our origin shortly: our hometown or our date of birth. Our goals should be described briefly in our essay, such as: our goals in the next 5 years. Furthermore, we should answer the next question about our biggest motivation to achieve our goals. Our motivation should be relevant to our goals. At the end of our essay, we should highlight our social activity experiences that are most impactful or the recent one. This social activity must relate and support our goals.
In writing an essay, we can use simple present tense. Simple present tenses is a form of tenses to show habits, general truths, repeated actions or unchanging situations, emotions, and expectations. We use the simple present tense to talk about things we do all of the time, such as: “I do laundry every weekend”, or “My brother read a book at a break time”. We also use simple present tense to talk about things that are always true, as well. For example: “I come from Jakarta”, or “I am a Forestry student”.
In this part 3, participants were given the opportunity to practice. They have to make sentences about them using 5 lists of questions (name, origin, goals, motivation and experience), and then the facilitator gives feedback. At the Q&A session, Yohana Esi Oratmangun (grantee Christian University of Indonesia, Maluku) asked about her obstacles to make good sentences in an essay. Usually, the obstacles to making good sentences are related to our vocabulary limitation or grammar arrangements. This can be learned through practicing more. Try to make an essay using the list of questions (name, origin, goals, motivation and experience), also find out the traits that can describe ourselves and are relevant to write in the essay, proofread and edit to double-check our essay.
