Myself Writing Evaluation.

    My mother language is Chinese, every single Chinese word consists of several different Chinese character components, just like English words consist of 27 letters. For me, the difficulty in Chinese writing is using some beautiful expression like ancient Chinese poems and proverbs and allusions. Because I have to understand and recite them first and then pick a right one to express my meaning, moreover, people do not use them at the most time of our daily talk. This is also a difficulty in my English writing although English expression such as idioms is much less hard to remember than Chinese. As a foreigner, it costs some time to learn as well. Another difficulty is organization, I usually think in Chinese and the structure of Chinese sentences are different from English. So I have to organize the structure of sentence and the whole article in a new Western way, and make it easy to understand for English speakers. In this class, I have learned that English articles begin with a topic sentence which is the main idea of the whole article, and give some specific details to support your idea by using descriptive and informative words. Of course, I also learned to be careful to use someone else idea.
    I think the Western style of citing sources is a way to force students create their own idea, but what if a couple of students have the same idea about an article without sharing it. What will the teachers regard them? Are they cheating? Another question is when a student finish his essay and all the ideas, does he have to check his idea through Internet in order to avoid plagiarism? As I said, some people may have the same idea as well, it is unfair to regard one is cheating and one is not. In China, we barely have the software to find out who is cheating ——we may have this technology in the near future, this is the weakness of our writing system. Because students may download papers from the Internet. But for citing sources, students in China do not do it often, because we do not have this rule and we just think it is not necessarily to cite unless we are going to publish our paper.Culture plays an important role,since different countries have different measurement of misconduct. For international students study in US,they have to adapt to the new rules which is not easy for them.Moreover, like Timothy mentioned in Redden's artical, international students have the pressure of achieveing a certain high GPA to maintain their Visa in US. This is another reason of why international students are inclined to commit misconduct.