I am not sure I’m getting as much benefit from my writing corrections as I could be. I don’t always understand the meaning of the correction types, and sometimes I wish there could be more notes to explain the reasons for the corrections.
I don’t need explanations for simple errors like articles or spelling, but some others are difficult to understand, therefore, every time I have to arrange one on one discussion with my tutor to explain the corrections, and that means I paid twice for the writing. Therefore, I would prefer more explanation.
Nancy,
To judge by your comment here, your writing is very good. I would imagine that the mistakes you make have more to do with word usage, how and when to use which words, and which words are normally used together. I would imagine that it is difficult to fully explain these things in the time and space available to the writing corrector. Nor do I think that explanations by themselves can prevent errors or unnatural usage.
Your writing and your language skills will improve gradually over time. I believe they already have. It is the practice of writing, then of studying the corrected version, trying to understand why changes were made, then reviewing the comments, studying the corrected text again in LingQ, saving words and phrases that you need to learn to use better from this text, then discussing this with your tutor; this whole process is more important than the explanations themselves.
I might add that more reading and listening and noticing are also part of the process. Language is not a matter of logical explanation as much as it is a matter of noticing patterns and developing new habits. I believe that what you are doing is working. Maybe you are expecting an instant “eureka” and do not realize the progress that you are making.
A little comment about progress…
I usually have a lot of items in the workdesk, and when I import an item that is too difficult (more than 25% of unknown words) I use to postpone it, now and then looking at their changing percentages.
I haven’t studied a lot these 3 weeks, for personal reasons. Indeed, I’ve studied much less that I’ve done in February. But I had a big suprise when the percentages came back: my “difficult” items percentages had dropped a lot!
This episode taught me exactly what Steve pointed out about progress. Most times, we are not aware of our progress, because it doesn’t occur in great jumps, they occur pace by pace.
Writing is for me the best way to improve, I have more time to look for the right words.
Only sometimes I see after correction, that I used wrong expressions and the sense (what the tutor corrected) is never that what I would like express.
To make this clear demand a discussion but I cannot have the correction IN my writing.
The next is, that I feel uncomfortable when I use expressions they are higher as my knowledge status is. I think it isn’t suitable to me.
It sounds how a typical Swabian would like speak high German 