Life is full of stories, especially when you live in a place with history.

My husband and me, we like history and travel around historical places any vacant day. This day we went to XIV-th century shipyard. Place was nice and contained old building with inclusion of Roman stones and exposition with modern models of antique ship building process. Museum was on the sea, so we were inside the rooms and saw sea outside. We could even touch it. Shipyard consisted of few rooms, then there was door into very nice garden and sidewalk to a XIII-th century armory. That day the armory was closed, so we looked at the closed door and started to go back. This was early spring, weather was sunny, warm, but not hot enough. Flowers exuded rich flavor. Garden was very nice and we were not in hurry. But time passed and we wanted to go back. To our surprise door into shipyard, from which we came into this garden, was closed. That's also meant door outside of the museum was closed. We shouted for few minutes, but nobody was around. Fortunately, in XXI-st century we have cell phones. So we called police. And here comes the funniest part of the story. How to explain police where we are? - Where are you from? - asked policeman - Hm, well, - I said name of my home country and added: "But I am in your town now" - Where are you now? - In the museum - Why don't you call somebody, but call police? - Nobody around: only sea. I think policeman thought for some time I am mad and he should've call hospital. However several minutes later museum's employee returned back and made us free. How this story relates to my writing experience? Well, I see this text is not ideal. In my head this is funny thing which is good to laugh at after we survived those quite shoking minutes. However, text above shows my weak sides completely. We were not trained to write stories in school. Those of us who choose technical career had not such studies thereafter either. But this does not mean we have nothing to say. More you live, more you have to say. This can be simply funny story like I wrote above or something you want to teach others about. Probably email you need to send to a friend, customer or a colleague. So I am taking this course to write better texts. But what makes texts better? First thing I think about before start writing is "what I am going to say?". Second is the structure of the text. Structure is very important. Without structure reader can get missed in details and don't get right conclusion. But structure itself does not make good text.

If take as example this essay, I can say I am going to write: who I am, short story as an example, brief history about why I want to write, what I already know about writing and, finally, some conclusion. This is the structure, but this is not the text. To make text from the structure I need to explain. Explanation can be short and actually I always tend to make them short. This is good, because in this case reader will be less bored, but at the same time it is easy to miss important details, necessary for understanding. Or, in case of funny story, for atmosphere. However, adding too much details can drown reader into something not related to main idea. At the other side this can show lack of the structure if not the main idea. Example of this can be a story, describing interrelations between two people: their walk, talking, sudden touches. If this is written by an artist this can be great love story. But without good enough skills this is simply mess. And yes, I tried to write such a story as an example for this essay. Better not to read! I usually rather skip details, then add them too much. Although this is not exactly true. I skip those which I tend to think not important, but writting about my expertise area I enreach the text with technical details, however still miss those which I think are obvious. Experience shows this is not always good solution, because it is hard to know in advance if your reader knows one detail or not. But this is how I write. So here are my weak and strong sides as a writer. I understand the structure, write a plan, work through it, but bad with appropriate proportion of details. And there is another skill which I, unfortunately, lack absolutely. This is knowledge of the way how to write sentences in such a manner that they sound like a music. I don't want to call this "poetry", because prose and technical literature is a bit different thing, but this skill of creating of euphonious text is something any writer should aspires to. What I am seeking in this course? Well, more topics to think about writing, more aspects to pay attention for. And, of course, practice of methods learned. 2 flag