Kyoto, Japan
Joined on 9/8/15
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Kyoto, Japan
Joined on 9/8/15
CoconutHead221
The song is great, you deserve it! Your English looks very good overall, but there are a few minor things that I think can be improved. Since you've been formally taught English you may understand a few of those little "gotchas" that English is full of, but as a native speaker myself there are a few things that caught my eye in your writing. In your first sentence "My song is frontpaged again!", the "-ed" in "frontpaged" implies past tense, yet "is" is present tense, creating a bit of a contradiction. That's an acceptable thing to flub in casual conversation, but your formal language makes it stand out. Another note regarding your writing is your tone, and it's flip-flopping between formal and casual. You largely rejected using contractions which made your writing sound formal and stiff. If this was academic writing or a business letter that would be fine, but your use of phrases like "by the way" and things like exclamation marks come off as very casual. I assume you want a casual and friendly tone, so I recommend using more contractions in your writing. But to reiterate, you've been formally educated in English so you may have a more precise understanding of some of it's quirks that I do. Everything I've said is just little nitpicks, your writing was still very good! Keep up the good work.
Precipitation24
Thank you!!
I am (still) trying to write natural English, so your advice is very helpful.
I am impressed you noticed that there are almost no contractions in my sentences. At school in my country, I was trained to academic writing, and one of the things I was taught was not to use contractions in English composition. This culture is still ingrained in me today.
Also, thank you for the valuable information about "by the way". I was very surprised because this is an expression which Japanese people are very familiar with and I often see it in business English textbooks. As an English learner who wants to write formal sentences, I would like to use a different formal way of saying "by the way". For example, "incidentally" seems to be a good one, but oddly enough, since Dr. Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs used it ("Incidentally, did you read...."), I thought it was a word that older men use for young ladies....I have to study more.
Also, tense is the first part of learning English so I am embarrassed that I still make many mistakes in tenses. Due to the fear of such mistakes, I still cannot handle the present prefect and past perfect tenses.