The Journey
“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”
- Carl Sagan, an astronomer, astrophysicist, and author
I never loved to read. It always seemed boring and purposeless, which caused me to never truly focus on the meaning of the author’s message. My mind always wandered because I never felt the words that the authors were feeling. The creativity of my mind also seemed to overwhelm the creativity of the book I was reading. I was focused more on my ideas rather than the ideas of the author. Writing, however, was a way for me to spill all my bottled creativity into words that meant something. In fourth grade, I had a genius idea. I was going …show more content…
She writes that language evokes emotion, brings about visual imagery, forms complex ideas, and promotes the simple truth. Tan describes the “broken English” that she uses with her mother. An example of phrases she said are, "Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong -- but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people” (652) To most people it sounds garbled and unitelligent but in her mind, it makes perfect sense. Tan explains that this “broken English” is sometimes even more evocative than “correct English,” communicating at a different and imaginative level. Her story shows that literary creativity is not about using the biggest words in the dictionary or the perfect grammatical structure. No: literary creativity is the ability to convey the deepest parts of emotions, the most complex of ideas, the greatest truths, and the most vibrant of literary pictures. Tan spoke to me not only in a literary sense, but in a way that helped me expand my literary horizons, even including a new sense of language known as “broken
“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”
- Carl Sagan, an astronomer, astrophysicist, and author
I never loved to read. It always seemed boring and purposeless, which caused me to never truly focus on the meaning of the author’s message. My mind always wandered because I never felt the words that the authors were feeling. The creativity of my mind also seemed to overwhelm the creativity of the book I was reading. I was focused more on my ideas rather than the ideas of the author. Writing, however, was a way for me to spill all my bottled creativity into words that meant something. In fourth grade, I had a genius idea. I was going …show more content…
She writes that language evokes emotion, brings about visual imagery, forms complex ideas, and promotes the simple truth. Tan describes the “broken English” that she uses with her mother. An example of phrases she said are, "Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong -- but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people” (652) To most people it sounds garbled and unitelligent but in her mind, it makes perfect sense. Tan explains that this “broken English” is sometimes even more evocative than “correct English,” communicating at a different and imaginative level. Her story shows that literary creativity is not about using the biggest words in the dictionary or the perfect grammatical structure. No: literary creativity is the ability to convey the deepest parts of emotions, the most complex of ideas, the greatest truths, and the most vibrant of literary pictures. Tan spoke to me not only in a literary sense, but in a way that helped me expand my literary horizons, even including a new sense of language known as “broken