I never like learning English as I felt that it is a weird language and indeed it is. The environment I lived in taught me that English is an important language and if I want to survive in the society in the future, I must master my English. Therefore since young, my parents have been encouraging me to read more and be in more contact with English. However, my English standard was still on the average side.

At the end of secondary school, I am required to pass my ‘O’ level English in order to get a place in the junior collage or polytechnic, thus my English teacher started drilling the class hoping to help us make maximum improvement in the shortest time. The strategy my teacher used was to focus on composition as she felt that writing a good composition will maximize our score since the comprehension section was rather unpredictable.

She always made us practice checking; where after we were done with our composition we were required to check out for vocabulary, grammar and spelling mistakes. In the past, I am a borderline passer but since I adopted my teacher’s method, I failed all the composition I have written. I was disheartened then, that I decided for once to abandon the new writing style and switch back to what I am used to. To my surprise, I passed the particular composition. I did some thinking then and got to a conclusion; I do know how to write properly, reading since young have subconsciously taught me the correct way of phrasing, it was just I did not realize it. As I was too focus on correcting and checking, I made more mistakes.      

The point I want to emphasize here is that reading really helps a lot in writing; we may not feel it but deep inside us we are getting better. It is alright to read below our level as long as we understands and enjoyed it. Reading beyond can come afterwards where we are in the comfortable zone, by then, we should be able to experiences the beauty of this language, English.