Last night, I felt bad reading my brief note sent in a hurry before dinner. You spent time and energy reviewing my essay. At the least, I should have responded to each point. But my response appeared ungrateful and defensive. I apologize. You did a great job in giving me feedbacks. I commend you for that!
I also need to make a mental note for myself: don’t reply to posts in a hurry. Sit on it or even sleep on it, esp. if it’s about some touchy subjects like writing. :)
There are 3 or 4 correct ways of saying a sentence and thousands of wrong ways.
In between, there is a grey area with a couple of ways that could give away our “accent”. What we are grappling with is mainly in this area.
(1) Most of your comments are about choices among the correct ways, like the ones you think it’s more concise but I feel it might not be clear.
eg: “calling on the phone” ->calling. I struggled with it writing it. I used “calling” at first, but was afraid it might not reproduce the sentence from the original paper. I thought of “phoning”, but later decided on calling on the phone, risking being verbose.
(2) Some of your comments are dragging the writing from the correct ways down to the grey area. Like the suggestion of replacing “work meticulously” with “overwork, overkill”. They are not appropriate for that context. My lg said (I hate to quote him, which makes me sound like a bully. :) ), "overwork" is only used when you are talking about “working for the boss too much”. That’s when he said, this kind of modification is pulling my writing down. sorry if that sounded harsh.
As to the first sentence, you are completely right. It was not the best sentence structure. my hu*****and did not correct it though.The punctuation is jennea’s suggestion.
Again, thanks a lot for the bricks!
Why did we switch to English? now I have another essay to work on. kidding. haha.
