2015年英语六年级写作基础知识精选8篇 作文（热门20篇）

要想学好作文就需要多看、多写、多练习，下面是小编为大家收集的关于作文写作基础教学，欢迎大家阅读!

一、用眼去学会观察，提高写作的兴趣。

观察是对事物的感性认识。生活中，因为学生缺乏这方面的认识。故而凭空设想的描写、生搬硬套的抒情议论是无味的。常言道：“创作于生活而又高于生活”。鲁迅曾说：“学习作文，第一须观察!”这就充分地说明了观察对写作的重要性。我们要从正面引导学生去观察和接触事物，注重学生观察能力的培养，使观察成为写作的第一手资料。那么，学生便水到渠成地写出真人真事，抒发出真情实感来。

观察不仅局限于“用眼看”，还用耳聆听，用身体去体会。

二、用口来学会说话，激活写作的表达能力。

说话是口语教学的实施，亦是口语教学的最终目的。新课标特别强调了口语交际的重要性。因此，我们要给学生创造说话的动机和机会，叫学生学会学语言，用语言。说话锻炼的方式很多，在生活中，笔者常从一下几点做起，收益甚多。其一，巧设课堂疑问，训练学生“答疑”的机会。多鼓励学生发表意见和见解，充分调动学生的积极性。其二，创设课堂情境，让学生在角色中“扮演”中说话。注重学生讨论。其三，图文并茂，让学生利用客观情景做“导游”者。启发学生从不同的角度学会观察、想象和言论。其四，针对突发事件，让学生有所“议”。从肯定中让学生感悟说话的信心和兴趣。培养学生的说话方法是多种多样的，我们应全方位多角度地给学生创造机会。

三、用手学会练笔，感染写作的动力。

矛盾说：“应当时时刻刻身边有一支笔和一本草薄，把你所见所闻所为所感随时记录下来……”的确，平时让学生多写日记，多写感言，多抒情议论，大到新闻论坛，小到遣词造句，灵感观后录等。久而久之，学生的语言也通顺了，素材也就丰富了。不但有话可说，而且越说越精了。不仅如此，我们在优化设计上给学生予以练笔，“临摹”写法上练笔，插图引发上指导练笔等。

四、用心学会推敲修改，领略写作的方法技巧。

写作中的推敲和修改，是写作灵感的源泉。常人说：“三分写七分改”;美国作家柯德说过：“我的作品不是写出来的，而是改出来的。”鲁迅说过：“作文没有什么秘诀，要说有，那就是多写多修改。”可见修改的重要性。教师要引导学生用心领会琢磨、修改。从字、词、句、段、篇，立意，语言特点、谋篇布局、手法结构等诸方面进行修改，学生从而从消化到整合，竟而达到“随模铸器”，写作便不失谱了。

五、用脑去学会联想，提升写作能力的提高。

在真情实感的同时，展开丰富合理的想像，习作会更生动形象。诸如看图作文，命题作文，材料作文等等。但是，联想的并非是胡思乱造，凭空设想，而是想像其隐藏的侧面或背景。中国教育学会“十一五”科研规划重点课题说道：“手脑潜能开发与高效学习方法的研究与实践”是手脑演写作文系列教程之一。发展儿童的观察、表达、想象、抽象思维等综合能力的训练，尤为重要!

如何提高写作的兴趣，让学生不但有话可说，而且说的精，形象生动，下笔形如汩汩流水，就要注重观察、说话、练笔、修改、联想式的综合改进，就要用眼、口、手、心、脑相结合的感官活动。

综合基础知识主要测查应考人员对公务员所应掌握的综合基础知识的解、分析和运用能力。下面是综合基础知识有作文吗，欢迎参考阅读！

测查内容主要包括政治、法律、管理、经济、科技、党史、国情、公文和时事政治等。在考试大纲里面有，具体考什么题型，就不知道了，应该有单选，多选，可能有判断。写作：公务员写作则要使用实用性的语言！

作文是字、词、句、段篇的综合训练，它体现出每位同学的认识水平和文字表达能力。那么，怎样才能写好作文呢？一般说来应做到：

一、思想健康，中心明确。

二、内容具体，条理清楚。

三、语句通顺，意思连贯。

四、详略得当，主次分明。

五、善于观察，想象丰富。

六、书写工整，格式正确。

除平时留心观察事物，认识和抓住事物特点，自觉积极地积累写作素材外，还必须具备审题、确定中心、选择材料、谋篇布局、编写作文提纲和修改文章等方面的基础知识。

1、审题。

只有准确地审清题意，透彻理解题目的意思，解决好“写什么”的问题，写起来才能保证不偏题，不致于“下笔千言，离题万里”。这里教给同学们三种审题方法：

（1）分析法：先把题目按词拆开，然后一个词一个词琢磨，理解每个词的意思，弄清它们之间的关系。如《校园新事多》可分解为“校园”、“新”、“事”、“多”四个词，我们就能写发生在校园里的新鲜的事，至少要写出两件或两件以上的事。

（2）比较法：根据所给题目，自已拟几个相似的题目进行比较，弄清它们的写作范围和要求。如写《我和老师》，可自拟《我的老师》、《我爱您，老师》进行比较，找出它们之间的相同点和不同点，从而确定写作重点。

（3）设问法：先提出几个问题，并考虑好其中的重要问题，然后对照题目对假设的问题进行条理清楚，主次分明，详略得当的回答。如《她变》，可提问：变之前她是怎样的？她变的原因是什么？她变后是怎样的？有哪些人说她变？另外，对于特殊的题目要仔细推敲，弄清真正的意义。如《温暖》，就不能专写天气温暖，而应体现互相帮助或得到关怀爱护的感受。

2、确定中心

中心就是文章的灵魂。教给大家确定中心的方法；第一、要根据题目要求确定中心。如《记一位值得尊敬的人》要明确题目的重点是“尊敬”。值得尊敬的原因，就是文章的中心，写作时要紧扣这个中心。

第二、要根据自己平常的生活积累，根据自己平常的生活感受来确定中心。如写《我的好朋友王小明》，中心思想可表现王小明的好品质，他的优点。

3、选择材料

材料的选择、详略，都要为中心服务。常犯的毛病有：

（1）中心不突出，要说明的问题很多，头绪纷繁。

（2）详略不当，重点不突出，主次颠倒。

（3）选材平淡，不典型。因此，要注意两点：第一、

要围绕作文中心思想选择材料。第二、要选择自己最熟悉的、真实的、新颖的、典型的事件作为材料。

4、组织材料

材料的组织包括两项内容：一是对材料的安排。哪些先写，哪些后写，使文章“言之有序”；二是对材料的处理。哪些详写，哪些略写。要使文章“言之有序”，就要合理地分段。方法有：

（1）按事情发展的先后顺序安排材料。

（2）按时间的推移安排材料。

（3）按空间顺序安排材料。

（4）按事物几个方面安排材料。

（5）层层加深中心思想，由浅入深地安排材料。

5、编写提纲

提纲包括：中心思想和段落。一篇文章分几个层次，几个段落，哪个先写，哪个后写，哪个略写，哪个详写，在提纲里要反映出来。但又不能写得太详细，也不能太简单，要写得简明扼要，切实具体。如：

作文题目：有趣的蜗牛比赛中心：通过对蜗牛比赛的记叙，反映少年儿童课外生活的丰富多彩，表现少年儿童的生活情趣。

材料安排：

（1）我和表弟捉到几只蜗牛，想举行一次比赛。（略）

（2）为参赛蜗牛命名，做好比赛前准备。（略）

（3）比赛中蜗牛各自的表现。（详）

（4）比赛结果。（略）

（5）结尾。（略）

6、开头与结尾

常见的开头方法有：

（1）开门见山，直截当。

（2）说明情况，交代背景。

（3）描写环境，渲染气氛。

（4）提出问题，引人入胜。

（5）巧讲故事，引人注意。

（6）先说结果，倒叙开头。

常见的结尾方法有：

（1）事情完整，自然结尾。

（2）总结主题，抒发感受。

（3）照应开头，留有余味。

（4）含蓄结尾，引人入胜。

7、过渡与照应

过渡要做到自然灵活、承上启下、语言连贯、彼此衔接。办法一般有过渡段、过渡句及过渡词三种。

上下文之间的互相呼应，就是照应。照应方法一般有三种：前后照应、首尾照应和正文与标题照应。

8、修改作文

修改文章包括：

修改错别字和用错的词；修改有毛病的句子；修改用错的标点符号；理清个别颠倒的句子和段落；看看开头是否吸引人，结尾是否有力；看看是否有内容表达不清楚，不具体的地方；检查并修改中心不明确，不集中的毛病。

看图作文是以图画或图表来提供目的、对象、时间、地点、内容等情景，要求作者借助图画，通过联想将一组画面的直观内容转换成传神达意的文字形式，用于反映图中所表现的思想内容。

从写作体裁上看，可说明介绍，可叙事记人、可写景状物，也可以发表议论。

1.仔细审题、弄清题目要求

看图作文主要考查考生的观察能力、分析能力、想象能力、创造能力和语言表达能力。

想写好看图作文，必须遵循以下步骤：

首先，必须通读试题中的每一个字，认真观察所给的每一幅图画，正确理解提示所提出的各种要求，从而明确作文的中心思想，判断文章的类型、特点，了解文章的重点内容，力求切中题意。

2.审好图，确定要素

认真观察图中的故事发生于何时?何地?图中的人物为何人?他们做了什么事情?结果如何?

3.考虑用恰当的词语、句型和时态

弄懂了图上的大意后，在内心构思一个基本的框架，考虑用什么样的句型、词语、时态来充分表达文章的内容，尽可能用你熟悉的词语或句型，力求语言准确、意思明了。

4.列出要点，组织语言

在认真审题、弄清题意的基础上，我们应逐个完整无误地把内容要点列出来，我们可以在每幅图画的旁边用简单的词语标出其所表达的要点，这样，既可以提醒自己不要漏写了要点，又能防止过分发挥。接着就可以将内容要点译成英文词语或句子，以便下一步组织语言，形成短文。要注意使用适当的连接词或过渡性语句，以使上下文更为连贯，过渡自然。

5.详细得当

对一些细节方面的内容，如果是文章必不可少的细节，在写作时不可将这些细节忽略;如果是可有可无的细节，则可视具体情况进行增删。因此，我们在审图时，一定要注意各图中的一些细节内容，看其是否影响文章的内容。

6.仔细检查、修改

文章写完后，应进行必要的检查、修改，力求全文内容表达准确、完整，并最大限度减少错误。

具体从如下做起：

(1)核对图中要点是否有遗漏;

(2)时态、语态是否正确;

(3)文章句、段、篇是否连贯;

(4)用词是否得当、词数是否符合要求;

(5)单词大小写、拼写、标点是否准确无误。

最后提醒大家：一篇好的作文不但要内容写得好，字迹也要美观、工整、漂亮。

SCI论文，即为被SCI索引收录的期刊所刊登的论文，小编收集了SCI论文写作基础结构，欢迎阅读

标题：SCI论文写作的标题必须符合文章内容而简明、准确表达论文的性质和目的。文题要相扣、标题通常由名词性短语构成，如果出现动词，多为分词或动名词形式。标题不能太长，一般希望一篇论文标题不要超过100个英文字符。

摘要：SCI论文写作的的摘要重在说明全文通过什么样的方法取得什么样的结果，资料数据，提出有意义的结论(包括阳性及阴性)。具体按四要素来书写中、英文摘要：目的、方法、结果、结论。结论中、英文内容要一致。摘要以200-300字为宜。关键词5条。英文摘要也应包括文题、作者姓名(汉语拼音)、单位名称、所在城市名等。作者应列出前3位，3位以上加序言：过去研究的情况、方法、目的和所获得的主要成果或特点。此处不宜超过100～200字。

引言：SCI论文写作的引言部分提出课题背景，总结前人研究成果、现实情况及存在问题，采取适当的方式强调本人在本次研究中最重要的发现或贡献。

材料和方法：这是SCI论文写作的执行科研的关键之处，对于要进行的研究工作，必须按照实际情况，在事先选择好适合一定条件、数量的研究对象采用的特定实验、诊断或治疗方法(包括实验步骤、方法、器材试剂、药品)，经过一定时期的观察，相同条件下的对照组，与他人结果比较并综合分析。如果审稿者认为实验材料和方法有缺陷，则该论文的设计也有缺陷。其结果是该论文被拒绝，其重点在于完整的描述。

结论：将原始资料全部集中起来，随机、客观地加以分析，不用特意地加以挑选。对于一些阴性结果，不必全部列出。尽量组织严密，符合逻辑、进行对比观察，在检验过程中不一样地方加以修正、补充。SCI论文写作在结论的问题中避免以假设来证明假设，以未知来说明未知，并依次循环推论。

讨论：SCI论文写作的精髓，主要是研究结果的解释和推断。概述实验条件的优缺点，本人结果与其他学者结果的异同，突出新发现、新发明;解释因果关系，说明偶然性与必然性;急需研究的方向和存在的主要问题。说明研究局限性对结果的影响。

致谢：SCI论文写作的致谢部分主要表明该研究是什么资金或基金资助的情况下完成的并对参与人员和单位表示感谢即可。

参考文献：所列参考文献的目的，在于引证资料(观点、方法等)的来源，不可随意转抄。一般要求引用文献者必须用阅读过的重要的、近年的文献为准。论著10条左右，论著摘要5条，综述20条左右，参考文献的引用要根据收录参考文献的原则。

SCI论文写作基础结构内容由“辑文编译”整理，转载请请注明出处!

广州辑文汇聚了来自全球著名100多所顶尖高等教育学府的600多名各专业博士团队的雄厚学术力量，主要为非英语国家科研工作者提供SCI论文写作发表﹑医学论文润色编辑和各类科研设计相关服务。

SCI journal editors to teach you how to write SCI thesis

SCI paper, how to write? General can be divided into the title, abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, acknowledgements, references eight parts.

Title: the nature and purpose of SCI writing title must conform to article content and concise, accurate expression of the. The title of the paper to buckle, the title is usually composed of noun phrases, if the verb, participle or a gerund form for. The title can not be too long, generally want a paper title not more than 100 English character.

Abstract: the abstract is writing SCI papers by what kind of method to obtain what kind of result, data, put forward meaningful conclusion (including positive and negative). According to four to have written, English Abstract: objective, method, result, conclusion. The conclusion, English content should be consistent. Abstract of 200-300 words. Keywords 5. English abstract should also include the title, author name (Pinyin), unit name, city name. The author lists the top 3, 3 plus Preface: main achievements or past research situation, method, purpose and the. Here is more than 100 ~ 200 words.

Introduction: SCI the introduction of writing this topic background, summing up the results of previous studies, the reality of the situation and the existing problems, take appropriate means to emphasize my most important in this research discovery or contribution.

Materials and methods: This is a key point to SCI thesis writing research, for to carry out the research work, must be in accordance with the actual situation, in a good choice for certain conditions, the number of subjects with specific experimental, diagnostic or therapeutic methods (including pre experiment steps, methods, equipment, reagents, drugs), after observation of a certain period of time, the control group under the same conditions, and other results and analysis. If reviewers that the experimental materials and methods have drawbacks, then design the defective. The result is the thesis is rejected, the focus is to complete description.

Conclusion: will concentrate all the original data, random, objective analysis, dont have to choose. For some negative results, not all. As organized, logical, were observed and compared, in the inspection process is not the same place revision, supplement. SCI thesis writing in order to avoid the assumption that assumption in the conclusion of the unknown, to illustrate the unknown, and in turn circular reasoning.

Discussion: SCI thesis writing essence, is to interpret and infer the results. The advantages and disadvantages of the experimental conditions, the similarities and differences of himself with other scholars results, highlighting the new discovery, new invention; explain the causal relationship, the contingency and inevitability; urgent research direction and the main problems. The effect of limitations on the results.

Acknowledgements: SCI thesis writing acknowledgements part mainly shows the research is funded what funds or funds under the condition of complete and expressed thanks to the participation of personnel and units.

Reference: the column reference purposes, in the citation data (point, etc.) sources, can not be copied. General requirements cited references must be used to read important, recent documents shall prevail. On the 10 or so, on the 5, in about 20, for reference according to the included reference principle.

The above content by text compiled finishing, reprint please indicate the source! Series Guangzhou Wenhui together strong academic strength from the world famous more than 100 top institution of higher education, more than 600 professional doctoral team, mainly for non English speaking countries, scientific research workers to provide SCI thesis writing medical papers published, Polish editing and all kinds of scientific research design service.

题目：请以“My Class Teacher”为题，写一篇不少于60个单词的作文。

My Class Teacher我的班主任

My class teacher is Mr. Wang. He is strict but kind. He has taught us Chinese for two years.我的班主任是王老师，他是一个要求严格而亲切的老师。他已经教了我们两年语文。

He always tells us to study hard but not all the time. Sometimes he plays with us. He says, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." I think he is a good class teacher.他总是告诉我们要好好学习，但不是时时刻刻学习。有时他会和我们一起玩。他说：“只会用功不玩耍，聪明孩子也变傻。” 我觉得他是个很好的班主任。

点评：这篇文章取材的是身边熟悉的人，作者也有东西可写，更具有可读性。另外，写人时把主语稍作调整，读起来轻松多了。

I am a 15-year-old girl. My name is [ename]Cherry[/ename]. Now I am studying in the middle school. I want to be an actress because I think it is a funny and exciting job...

写人的常见句式如：

This is my friend, Mary.

She is... years old.

She is a teacher/ an artist/ a singer...

She/ He gets up at 6/5... / early/ late.

She/ He has sports at school.

She/ He likes...

She/ He is strong/ fat/ slim/ kind/ thin/...

She/ He looks like...

She/ He is good at English/ maths/ Chinese/ physics...

The Spring Festival, the most important festival to Chinese. Is China the biggest, the most lively, one of the most important ancient traditional festivals, is also unique to Chinese festival.

Festival, is the beginning of the lunar calendar, another name is called New Years day, Spring Festival is the biggest, the most lively, China one of the most important ancient traditional festivals, is also unique to Chinese festival. Is the most concentrated expression of Chinese civilization. Since the western han dynasty, the custom of Spring Festival continues today. The Spring Festival, generally refers to New Years eve and the first day. But in private, in the traditional sense of the Spring Festival is from the Greek festival of the day or month, 23 or 24 people, until the fifteenth, among them with New Years eve and the first day of the first lunar month. How to celebrate this holiday, in one thousand years of history development, formed some relatively fixed customs and habits, there are a lot of handed down also. During the traditional festival, the Spring Festival of the han nationality in our country and most of ethnic minorities have to hold various celebration activities, these activities are to worship deities, worshiping ancestors, blow away the cobwebs, meet jubilee blessing, pray for good harvest as the main content. Form rich and colorful, activities with strong ethnic characteristics. On May 20, 2006, "Spring Festival" folk have been approved by the state council listed in the first batch of state-level non-material cultural heritage list.

The origin of the Spring Festival has a legend, the Chinese ancient times have a kind of call "year" monster, head long feelers, fierce abnormalities. "Year" the elder deep in the bottom of the sea, every New Years eve just climbed out, swallowed cattle damage lives. Therefore, every New Years eve that day, the people of CunCunZhaiZhai could flee to the mountains, to escape the "year" animal damage. One NianChuXi, from the village outside a begging the old man. Folks a hurried panic scene, only the east village, an old woman gave the old man some food, and urged him quickly up the hill avoid "year" beast, the old man stroked his beard say with smile: "mother-in-law if let me stay overnight in the home, I must have" years "beast." Old woman continue to persuasion, begging the old man smiling without a word. At midnight, "nian" beast into the village. It found the village atmosphere unlike previous years, village east wifes husbands family, the door stick red paper, candle lit the room. "Year" beast was a shake, long a sound. Nearly the door, hospital suddenly spread "banging spluttered" Fried sound, "nian" shuddered, again dare not go up. Originally, "year" the most afraid of red, fire and exploding. At this time, her mother-in-laws door open and saw hospital a red-robed man laughed. "Year" frightened to disgrace, mess up. The next day is the first day, the people of refuge back very surprised to see the village safe. At this point, the old woman was suddenly enlighted, quickly spoke to the fellow villagers begging the old mans promise. This matter quickly spread around the village, people know driven "years" beast approach. (the legend of hakka) from then on, every year New Years eve, families paste red couplets, firecrackers; Household candle lit, keeping stay by age. Beginning in the early morning, still walk close bunch of congratulate friends say hello. This custom spread more widely, Chinese the most solemn of the folk traditional festival.

春节，中国人最重要的节日。是中国最盛大、最热闹、最重要的一个古老传统节日，也是中国人所独有的节日。

节，是农历的岁首，春节的另一名称叫过年，是中国最盛大、最热闹、最重要的一个古老传统节日，也是中国人所独有的节日。是中华文明最集中的表现。自西汉以来，春节的习俗一直延续到今天。春节一般指除夕和正月初一。但在民间，传统意义上的春节是指从腊月初八的腊祭或腊月二十三或二十四的祭灶，一直到正月十五，其中以除夕和正月初一为高潮。如何过庆贺这个节日，在千百年的历史发展中，形成了一些较为固定的风俗习惯，有许多还相传至今。在春节这一传统节日期间，我国的汉族和大多数少数民族都有要举行各种庆祝活动，这些活动大多以祭祀神佛、祭奠祖先、除旧布新、迎禧接福、祈求丰年为主要内容。活动形式丰富多彩，带有浓郁的民族特色。2006年5月20日，“春节”民俗经国务院批准列入第一批国家级非物质文化遗产名录。

春节的来历有一种传说，中国古时候有一种叫“年”的怪兽，头长触角，凶猛异常。“年”长年深居海底，每到除夕才爬上岸，吞食牲畜伤害人命。因此，每到除夕这天，村村寨寨的人们扶老携幼逃往深山，以躲避“年”兽的伤害。有一年除夕，从村外来了个乞讨的老人。乡亲们一片匆忙恐慌景象，只有村东头一位老婆婆给了老人些食物，并劝他快上山躲避“年”兽，那老人捋髯笑道：“婆婆若让我在家呆一夜，我一定把‘年’兽撵走。”老婆婆仍然继续劝说，乞讨老人笑而不语。 半夜时分，“年”兽闯进村。它发现村里气氛与往年不同：村东头老婆婆家，门贴大红纸，屋内烛火通明。“年”兽浑身一抖，怪叫了一声。将近门口时，院内突然传来“砰砰啪啪”的炸响声，“年”浑身战栗，再不敢往前凑了。原来，“年”最怕红色、火光和炸响。这时，婆婆的家门大开，只见院内一位身披红袍的老人在哈哈大笑。“年”大惊失色，狼狈逃蹿了。第二天是正月初一，避难回来的人们见村里安然无恙十分惊奇。这时，老婆婆才恍然大悟，赶忙向乡亲们述说了乞讨老人的许诺。这件事很快在周围村里传开了，人们都知道了驱赶“年”兽的办法。(客家人的传说)从此每年除夕，家家贴红对联、燃放爆竹;户户烛火通明、守更待岁。初一一大早，还要走亲串友道喜问好。这风俗越传越广，成了中国民间最隆重的传统节日。

导语：英语写作是一种创作性的学习过程。下面是小编收集的小升初英语作文写作技巧，欢迎大家阅读!

英语写作是一种创作性的学习过程。启动知识信息储存，构思立意，谋篇布局，遣词造句，对语言表达的正确性和准确性、思维的逻辑性和文章的条理性都比口语要求更高。通常英语写作有以下几个特点：紧扣教学大纲对考生书面表达的要求;以有指导的写作为主(guidedwriting)，便于考生在短时间内构思成文;突出试题的交际性，考查考生在特定的情景中运用语言的能力;增强试题的实用性，所选话题贴近学生学习生活，为学生所熟悉;看图作文主要考查考生运用所学知识解决实际问题的能力。

英语写作注意两点

一、先审题，弄清写作要求审题是写好作文的前提，也是书面表达的基础。如果写偏了题，语言表达再好也很难得高分。审题时要注意两个方面：

1.认真地看两遍题目，包括提示，全面了解写作要求。

2.理清思路，确定体裁、框架结构和内容。

二、用英语进行思维英语写作时必须排除汉语思维的干扰。

从现在起应逐渐加大阅读量和听的输入量，将阅读、听力训练与书面表达有机地结合起来。经常体会和领悟作者传递信息和表达思想的方式。在话题讨论和写作中经常运用所学到的表达方式就会有所创造。还要尽量做到“五多”：多看、多听、多思考、多用心体验和感悟身边的人和事、多用英语说和写自己的体验和感受。

最后一个月如何训练英语写作

1.重视增加阅读量是提高英语写作的途径之一。

目前，考生在进行大量阅读的同时，应注重所读材料的文章结构以及连接词的运用(ontheotherhand，however，furthermore)、作者的表达方式(词汇、习惯用语和典型句子的使用)、作者是如何进行叙述和议论的。

2.在教师的指导下，平时应勤写多练。

练习写作应从基本功抓起。在中译英翻译训练过程中，加强积累适量的词汇、词组和增加各种类型句子的运用。把握好各种句型和词汇的搭配，并从各类题材和体裁着手，多阅读好的范文。然后模仿写作，作文写好之后，一般都要修改。第一遍收笔后，先看一看结构，然后从字词上推敲，使文章“充实”起来。更重要的是经老师修改过的作文一定要仔细地看一至两遍，然后再认真地抄写一遍，收获将会很大。

英文写作“四步走”

由于时间限制，考试时必须在所限定的时间内完成英语作文。英语作文步骤如下：

1)作文动笔之前一般都要先打腹稿。在确立中心上、运用材料上、篇章结构上，充分酝酿。

2)考虑好想写多少句子，该用哪些动词和词组等。

3)边写边思考内容的连贯性，语言和句子的准确性。

4)写完后一定要再细看一遍。

主要体裁作文写作技巧

(一)写提示议论文应考虑的几点：

1.文章开头，能依据提示确立主题句(topic)阐明观点或看法。

2.会使用连接词分层次说明理由、缘由(supportingsentences)。

3.归纳总结，首尾呼应。

(二)看图作文应考虑的几点：

1.看懂图片，把图片展示的人物、地点、时间、事件等有机地串联起来，使之成为内容连贯的句子。

2.确定短文须用的时态和该用的人称。

3.确定体裁(说明文还是记叙文)，接着用简洁的语句描述图片或图表大意。

4.根据图片或图表大意议论。

想象力是十分强烈地促进人类发展的伟大天赋，那么大家知道学生如何写好想象文章呢？下面一起来看看！

想象是以感觉、知觉和记忆为基础的。三者的区别在于：感觉、知觉反映当前事物的形象；记忆反映过去感知的事物的形象；想象则反映未曾经历过的或现实中不存在的事物的形象，例如《西游记》中的孙悟空、猪八戒及各种妖魔鬼怪，都是想象的形象，是非现实的。?想象在科学论文和文学作品的写作中有着重要的作用。大量的科学研究成果是受想象的启发而获得的，无数文学人物的形象是通过想象而创造出来的。所以，爱因斯坦说：“想象力比知识更重要，因为知识是有限的，而想象概括着世界上的一切，推动着进步，并且是知识进化的源泉。严格地说，想象力是科学研究中的实在因素。”（《爱因斯坦文集》第一卷）

古今中外的许多作家都认为想象力是文学创作绝对必需的。例如，茅盾说：“创作文学时必不可缺的，是观察的能力与想象的能力：两者缺一不可。”（《茅盾文艺杂论集》上集）

想象力的基础是敏锐的观察力和牢固的记忆力。较强的想象力表现为：善于控制想象的方向，围绕一个中心展开想象；善于提高想象活动的新颖程度；善于在现实的基础上创造非现实的新形象；想象的内容是丰富的、多层次、多侧面的。这种较强的想象力主要是经由人的后天教育与环境熏陶，通过实践的锻炼而逐步发展起来的。

重视并且认真培养、锻炼想象力，就可使想象活动在写作中发挥开拓思路、强化感情、促进独创、深化主题的作用。

想象分为有意想象和无意想象。梦是无意想象的极端表现，与写作有着密切的关系。然而，写作中的想象按其创造性的本质来说，则都是有意想象。有意想象又可以分为再造想象和创造想象。科学写作中的想象具有客观性和精确性，而文学写作中的想象具有主观性和虚构性。

文学创作想象的主要特点是进行表象的分解与综合。只有在理解想象的特点的基础上，才能经过不断的写作实践，培养出丰富的想象能力。

[写作基础：学生如何写好想象文章

春华秋实，颗粒满仓。下面语文迷收集了秋天的英文句子，欢迎阅读。

1. 我认为秋天是一年中最美的季节。

I think autumn is the most beautiful season in a year.

2. 秋天时叶子变黄。

The leaves turn yellow in autumn.

3. 在秋天的晚上，我感到一丝凉意。

I feel a little cool in the autumnal night.

4. 秋天里树木都是光秃秃的。

The trees were naked during autumn.

5. 今天的天气已露出了一丝秋天的气息。

There is a breath of autumn in the air today.

6. 九月的天气确实像秋天了。

The weather in September was positively autumnal.

7. 我喜欢收集秋天赤褐色的叶子。

I like to collect russet autumn leaves.

8. 我们欣赏着秋天里新英格兰树林的瑰丽色彩。

We are enjoying the resplendent colors of the New England woods in the autumn.

9.夜半酒醒人不觉，满池荷叶动秋风

Wake up to drink ,people feel the middle of the night, moving wind over a lotus leaf pond

10.生命如此简单，如秋，如落叶。

Life is so si-mp-le, such as the autumn, such as fallen leaves.

11.秋中，有些感情便如落叶般凋零了，有些影子却挥之不去，只在网络虚缈中才有熟悉的名字。凋零就凋零吧，倦缩也好，成灰亦好，管它感情如一树红叶般怎样盛开，怎样凋零。我站在川流不息的时间里，谈笑风生，任凭满天的叶子飞舞，最终覆盖苍凉的生命。

In autumn, some emotions, such as fallen leaves as they decline, some have lingering shadow, only in the virtual network is indistinct in the familiar names. It withered on the decline,ashes are also good, regardleof the feelings of like how the leaves like a tree in full bloom and how to decline. I was standing on the flow of time, laughing, even if the sky flying leaves, eventually covering the lives of desolation.

12.那是一幅描绘秋天景色的油画。

That is an oil painting of a landscape in spring.

The life of people facing difficulties, but really overcome countless again a few?

人的一生面对的困难，但真正克服无数的又有几个?

Life is short, only learned to overcome difficulties, it is learned to live. In you meet the time of difficulty, is still the head on back; Is escape or face; Is halfway or like summer by associating sisters as never say die?

生命是短暂的，只有学会克服困难，就学会了生活。在你遇到困难的时候，仍然是头背;是逃避还是面对;是半途而废还是像夏骆缔姐妹一样永不言弃?

Ask yourself: I learn to overcome difficulties? 13 years, a long long time, after years of wind and rain ", "a few years of experience, we more or less understand what, isnt it? As we get older, and the way the difficult like tree rings, also in going growth. Childhood we have "home" to the "haven, can now," we cant be dependent on my parents, because always hide in "", we haven never grow up, it is the sparrow will leave mom, soar alone in a symbol of freedom and liberty sky, learn to overcome difficulties is our way of growing up in the essential part of. In the face of difficulties, we can choose only win over.

问问自己：我学会克服困难?13年，很长很长的时间后，风和雨”年，“几年的经验，我们或多或少的了解，不是吗?随着我们年龄的增长，和方式很难像树的年轮，也会增长。童年的我们有“家”“还，可现在，“我们不能再依赖父母，因为总是躲在“，我们还没长大，这是麻雀会离开妈妈，独自翱翔在象征着自由的天空，学会克服困难是我们的方式在成长的必要部分。在困难面前，我们只能选择战胜。

In my own baby talk met countless difficulties, that is I still dont understand what is called a "no way at suspected a siler lining." In and unexpectedly in difficult, but that is given to escape, often with a cry to face obstacles in front of. For at that time the me difficulties, just like a place not climb mountain, and I, I can stand on its feet, just looked up at it, never want to go to go over it.

在我自己的宝宝说话遇到无数的困难，那是我还不懂什么叫“山穷水尽疑无路，银李宁。”出乎意料的困难，但这是逃避，经常用哭来面对面前的障碍。困难对于那时的我来说，就像一个地方不爬山，我，我可以站在它的脚下，只是看着它，不想去了。

I woke up early this morning. I went out to play with my neighbor. We watched cartoon at his home. After I went home about 4 Oclock in the afternoon, I helped my mother to do some house work. She is very happy so I am happy too.

成功需要学习，在大学系统学习或工作岗位上的在职自学都离不开善学。善学是成功的关键。悬梁刺股、凿壁借光的刻苦勤奋只是一种学习精神，这种学习精神将离不开善于归纳总结循循善诱、举一反三等得当的学习方法。本科阶段论文写作能力的培养是善学和归纳能力培养的重要渠道之一。论文写作进程包含选取和定义论文标题、搜寻和筛选文献及严谨客观的评述，并进一步以规范的模式陈述本人的研究成果。

论文是用于储存信息、传递学习成果的一个非常好的载体。它不仅能及时向人们传播资讯，广泛地普及已有的音乐研究成果，而且易于使人们从中吸取知识，并在此基础上不断创新。然而，当前在我们音乐院校，不论是学生，还是教师都忽略并缺乏成功研习的方法，在视野、思绪、方式等方面受到限制。音乐论文是音乐界进行学术和技术交流的工具之一，也是向社会传播音乐学理论成果的重要媒介之一。音乐专业中各个方向的学术交流、传播的渠道是多种多样的，除论文以外，还有音乐会摄像、灌音、计算机和浏览资料、研讨会等等。但是，音乐学术论文也是其中的主要形式之一。 所以，音乐专业学生的培育除演唱技能技巧的教授，还要重视培养其文字表达的能力。作为音乐人如果只懂得自己专业的表演技能技术，欠缺一定的文字表达本领，既会影响其更深入的学习、研究音乐，又将制约其学术水平的提升及对音乐文化的传播。因此，在音乐院校撰写音乐论文能力的培养是非常必要的，本文将从技术与文化理论相互融合的层面来探讨音乐论文的写作规律。

一、选题

音乐论文，是对音乐某一领域中的某些现象和问题进行探究。要写出一篇音乐论文需两个方面的基础：一是研究基础，二是写作基础。音乐论文依据不同的学科、选题和研究目的，有不同的类别。按学科分类，音乐论文可分为音乐表演研究论文和音乐学论文。体裁分类有论述、评述、评论、科学、实验、调研、教研、学位等基本类型论文。

选题，是研究过程中必需要做的最重要的一个决策。对自己的研究基础的动机要明确，所研究的范围有多大选择余地，是否有感兴趣的研究项目，并且要理解适用于自己研究项目中的所有规定和期望，查看研究基础领域内新近开展的其他研究案列。在集中研究范围并确定选题时，关键的环节就是能够选择大小适宜的题目，并且是在自己可以利用的时间、空间和资源的范围内能够做成的课题。

二、资料的搜集与梳理

文献资料的收集与梳理是每一项研究必做的工作，亦是研究者必备的基本功。每一个课题探究初始，是收集和累积资料，这是写好学术论文的基础。研究者务必了然项目研究的史籍、近况、国内外音乐状态、已达到的研究水平、使用的研究方式及取得的研究成果，从而也能明了此课题中所能借鉴的地方，并明确自己的研究基点。撰写论文的进程中需要摆事实讲道理，事实即是资料。研究者通过观察、试验、剖析、归纳，找出规律，将其升华为理论观点。探究的全过程始终建立在材料的基础上。庄子说：“水之积也不厚，则其负大舟也无力。风之积也不厚，则其负大翼也无力”。材料是形成论文观点和表达主题的基础。

当完成繁杂的资料搜集，研究者就要进入梳理、比较、鉴别和筛选资料的工作中。梳理文献的工作首先是阅读，其目的是了解与自己课题的主题相似的研究;了解与自己的研究计划相似的、正被运用的研究方法;了解与自己的项目有关的背景。抓住要点，批判地评价所阅读的内容，并将其删减整理、归类储存，使之从无序变有序，由纷杂变系统。

三、撰写提纲

撰写提纲是作者思路定型的过程，是对研究者的研究指导思想、学术观点、研究过程和研究成果通过文字完整地表达出来的全文总体设计。悉心拟定了论文提要，研究者便能把材料构成一个中心明确、研究深入、论证严谨、论据充分、取舍适宜的具有说服力的合理体系，形成一条明晰、通畅、联贯的写作思绪。从提纲的内容要求出发，分为简单提纲和详细提纲两种。简单提纲是高度概括的，只提示论文的要点，如何展开则不涉及。这种提纲虽然简单，但它是经过深思熟虑构成的，可以是论文重点突出，观点鲜明。详细提纲，是把论文的主要论点和展开部分较为详细地罗列出来。如果在写作之前准备了详细提纲，那么，执笔时就能更顺利。编写的步骤包括确定论文提要，形成全文概要、设计论文长度、编写全文提纲。全文的结构分绪论、本论、结论，提纲明确可拟定全文的大标题和各部分的小标题。

四、论点、论据、论证

从研究的过程来看，提炼观点并给于确定是学术论文的写作及整个研究过程的结果，也是论文写作前期的一个必备环节，所以提炼、确立明确的论点是必须的， 惟有通过确立论点这一理性思虑的过程，才能对论题深刻了解。论点又必须借论据加以论证，因而，论据必须是可信的，论据若不实不详，论点将失去有力的支柱。 用数据、事例、经典作家的言论以及千古传诵的名言作论据，都应经过认真的校对和核实。论证，是研究者按照一定的逻辑关系，将论点和论据架构在一起，用以证实论点的阐述过程。若是没有论证，不管建立的论点多显明，论据多充分，二者之间都会因缺少内在的逻辑联系而彼此孤立，毫无意义。

对不同的问题需要采纳不同的方式来论证，论证得法，就可以加强论文的逻辑性和说服力。不少音乐论文撰写者在写作过程中有一个通病，就是根据论题的要求首先提出中心论点。紧随其后罗列一大堆论据，末了用“综上所述”之类的话，反复一遍论文开始提出的中心论点做为结束语。这类论文，虽然摆出了大量的事实，但没有充分地讲道理，未进行周密的逻辑论证，无法揭示论点和论据之间的必然联系，致使观点和资料之间严重脱离。此外，在论证写作中，作者还要力避“草率论证”、“论题不明”、“偷换论题”、“循环论证”等不良的习惯。

总之，音乐论文写作是一个值得深入探讨的课题。寻觅一条适合于音乐专业学生研习论文写作的路径，探索出多种多样的写作方式，使学生将表演实践上升到理论高度，这就要学生在“干中学”，不断吸收别人的成功经验，善于发现问题、解决问题。通过这一途径，使自己所学的表演专业在实践与理论的紧密结合中不断进步，并为今后的音乐学习与研究打下坚实的基础。

导语：写英语作文是有规律可循的，你记住了一些英语句型，就可以直接套用。下面是yjbys作文网小编为您收集整理的资料，希望对您有所帮助。

1.welcometosp欢迎到某地

Eg.WelcometoChina。

2.What’sthematterwithsb./sth?

出什么毛病了?

Eg.What’sthematterwithyourwatch?

3.bedifferentfrom与---不同

Eg.TheweatherinBeijingisdifferentfromthatofNanjing。

4.bethesameas与……相同

Eg.Histrousersarethesameasmine。

5.befriendlytosb。对某人友好

Eg.Mr.Wangisveryfriendlytous。

6.wanttodosth。想做某事

Eg.Iwanttogotoschool。

7.wantsb.todosth。想让某人做某事

Eg.Iwantmysontogotoschool。

8.whattodo做什么

Eg.Wedon’tknowwhattodonext。

9.letsb.dosth。让某人做某事

Eg.Lethimentertheroom。

10.letsb.notdosth。让某人不做某人

Eg.Lethimnotstandintherain。

11.whydon’tyoudosth?

怎么不做某事呢?=

Eg.Whydon’tyouplayfootballwithus?

12.whynotdosth.?怎么不做某事呢?

Eg.Whynotplayfootballwithus?

13.makesb.sth。为某人制造某物=

Eg.Myfathermademeakite。

14.makesthforsb。为某人制造某物

Eg.Myfathermadeakiteforme。

15.What…meanby…?

做……是什么意思?

Eg.Whatdoyoumeanbydoingthat?

16.likedoingsth。喜爱做某事

Eg.Jimlikesswimming。

17.liketodosth。喜爱做某事

Eg.Hedoesn’tliketoswimnow。

18.feellikedoingsth。想做某事

Eg.Ifeellikeeatingbananas。

19.wouldliketodosth。愿意做某事

Eg.Wouldyouliketogorowingwithme?

20.wouldlikesb.todosth。愿意某人做某事

Eg.I’dlikeyoutostaywithmetonight。

21.makesb.dosth。逼使某人做某事

Eg.Hisbrotheroftenmakeshimstayinthesun。

22.letsb.dosth。让某人做某事

Eg.Letmesingasongforyou。

23.havesb.dosth。使某人做某事

Eg.Youshouldn’thavethestudentsworksohard。

24.befarfromsp离某地远

Eg.Hisschoolisfarfromhishome。

25.beneartosp离某地近

Eg.Thehospitalisneartothepostoffice。

26.begoodatsth./doingsth。

擅长某事/做某事

Eg.WearegoodatEnglish。

Theyaregoodatboating。

27.Ittakessb.sometimetodosth。

某人花多少时间做某事

Eg.Ittookmemorethanayeartolearntodrawabeautifulhorseinfiveminutes。

28.sb.spendssometime/money(in)doingsth。

某人花多少时间做某事

Eg.Ispenttwentyyearsinwritingthenovel。

29.sb.spendssometime/moneyonsth。

某事花了某人多少时间/金钱

Eg.Jimspent1000yuanonthebike。

30.sth.costssb.somemoney。

某物花了某人多少钱

Eg.ThebikecostJim1000yuan。

31.sb.payssomemoneyforsth。

某人为某物付了多少钱

Eg.Jimpaid1000yuanforthebike。

32.begin/startwithsth。开始做某事

Eg.Thestartedthemeetingwithasong。

33.begoingtodosth。打算做某事

Eg.WearegoingtostudyinJapan。

34.callAB叫AB

Eg.TheycalledthevillageGumtree。

35.thanksb.forsth./doingsth。

感谢某人做某事

Eg.Thankyouforyourhelp。

Thankyouforhelpingme。

36.What……for?为什么

Eg.WhatdoyoulearnEnglishfor?

37.How/whataboutdoingsth.?

做某事怎么样?

Eg.Howaboutgoingfishing?

38.S+be+the+最高级+of/in短语=

Eg.Lucyisthetallestinherclass。

39.S+be+比较级+thananyother+n。

Eg.Lucyistallerthananyotherstudentinherclass。

40.havetodosth。不得不做某事

Eg.Ihavetogohomenow。

41.hadbetterdosth。最好做某事

Eg.You’dbetterstudyhardatEnglish。

42.hadbetternotdosth。最好别做某事

Eg.You’dbetternotstayup。

43.helpsb.todosth。帮助某人做某事

Eg.LucyoftenhelpsLilytowashherclothes。

44.helpsb.dosth。帮助某人做某事

Eg.HeusuallyhelpsmelearnEnglish。

45.helpsb.withsth。帮助某人做某事

Eg.Isometimeshelpmymotherwiththehousework。

46.makeit+时间把时间定在几点

Eg.Let’smakeit8：30.

47.takesb.tosp带某人到某地

Eg.Mr.WangwilltakeustotheSummerPalacenextSunday。

49.havenothingtodo(withsb)

与某人没有关系

Eg.Thathasnothingtodowithme。

50.主语+don’tthink+从句

认为……不……

Eg.Idon’tthinkitwillraintomorrow。

英语写作过程中我们经常会用到一些短语，下面请看语文迷整理的高级英语短语，希望对你有帮助。

1. feel frustrated (挫折的)/ discouraged

2. a precious (宝贵的) experience

3. raise / arouse the awareness of …

4. acquire knowledge and skills学习知识和技能

5. a growing /increasing tendency

6. have a desire for sth / to do sth

7. put sth into practice

8. be closely related to…与…息息相关

9. be essential to sb 对某人来说必不可少

10. in a society with more competitions and challenges / in a competitive society

11. be keen on… 热衷于…

12. broaden one’s horizons开阔眼界

13. a large variety of / a wide range of …

14. make one’s dream come true

15. lay a solid/firm/stable foundation for/in…为…/在…方面打下坚实的基础

16. listen to teachers attentively

17. make a practical plan

18. motivate sb to do sth

19. bury oneself into study埋头学习

20. our determination and efforts

21. express my gratitude to her sincerely

22. be strict with sb in sth

23. achieve the final victory

24. encounter/face some difficulties

25. neglect the disadvantages

26. With the great efforts we’ve made, …

27. enhance/improve his ability of singing

28. be optimistic about

29. hold the strong belief that…

30. I’m confident / I’m convinced that…

31. with iron will and perseverance

32. pursue one’s dream 追逐梦想

33. arouse one’s passion for…唤起对…的热情

34. resist the temptation of good food

35. change one’s original mind

36. spare no effort to do sth 不遗余力做…

37. redouble one’s effort 加倍努力

38. leave a deep impression on sb

39. turn to sb for help / advice

40. relieve/lessen/reduce/ease one’s burden

41. with time going by=as time goes by

42. cherish/treasure/value our lives

43. vary from person to person

44. a boarding school 寄宿制学校

45. What surprised me most was that…

46. cause severe consequences(后果)

47. pay their tuition/school fees/schooling

48. physically and mentally

49. Some in favor of it think that…., while others are against it, holding the opinion that…

50. Success stems from hard work as it can help us accomplish the goal we’re striving for.

51. establish a special fund to help the poor

52. its negative aspect/impact is also obvious.

First we should check the wound to say how serious it is.

If it is only a small wound and bleeding a little blood,we should use some clean

gauze or cotton to press on his wound,give a little strength to stop it.

If it is bleeding harder and dark red blood bleeding in flow,wind the bandage in the distal end of the wound and then take him to the hospital.

If the wuond is bleeding seriously and the blood is fresh red,wind the bandage in the proximal endof the wound and then take him to the hospital.

The Great Wall of China is a Chinese fortification built from the 5th century BC until the beginning of the 17th century, in order to protect the various dynasties from raids by Hunnic, Mongol, Turkic, and other nomadic tribes coming from areas in modern-day Mongolia and Manchuria. Several walls, also referred to as the Great Wall of China, were built since the 5th century BC, the most famous being the one built between 220 BC and 200 BC by the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang; this wall was located much further north than the current wall built during the Ming Dynasty, and little of it remains.

The Great Wall of China was originally a project of Qin dynasty designed to keep out the nomadic Xiongnu invaders from the north. Some of the wall was built during the Qin, but most of it that we see today was constructed during the Ming dynasty.

The Great Wall is the worlds longest man-made structure, stretching over a formidable 6,352 km (3,948 miles), from Shanhai Pass on the Bohai Sea in the east, at the limit between "China proper" and Manchuria (Northeast China), to Lop Nur in the southeastern portion of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region . Along most of its arc, it roughly delineates the border between North China and Inner Mongolia.See List of largest buildings in the world

Great Wall is all the Chinese pride!!!

中国的长城是中国建造防御工事从公元前5世纪到17世纪初,为了保护的各个朝代Hunnic突袭,蒙古,突厥语和其他游牧部落来自现代蒙古和满洲地区。一些墙壁,也被称为中国的长城,自公元前5世纪建造,最著名的是一个建于公元前220年和公元前200年中国的第一个皇帝,秦始皇;这堵墙位于比当前更北墙建于明朝,和小尚。

中国的长城最初是秦朝的项目旨在抵御来自北方的游牧民族匈奴入侵者。建造这堵墙是在秦,但大多数我们今天看到建于明朝。

长城是世界上最长的人造结构,伸展在一个强大的6352公里(3948英里),从山海关在渤海东部,“中国的”之间的限制和满洲(东北),罗布泊的新疆维吾尔自治区东南部的部分。沿着它的大部分弧,北部边境中国北部和内蒙古。看到世界上最大的建筑

长城是中国人的骄傲! ! !

下面的材料旨在丰富学生在是非问题写作方面的思想和语言，考生在复习时可以先分类阅读这些篇章，然后尝试写相关方面的作文题。

对于素材中用黑体字的部分，特别建议你熟读，背诵，因为它们在语言和观点上都值得吸收。学习语言的人应该明白，表达能力和思想深度都靠日积月累，潜移默化。从某种意义上说，提高英语写作能力无捷径可走，你必须大段背诵英语文章才能逐渐形成语感和用英语进行表达的能力。这一关，没有任何人能代替你过。

因此，建议你下点苦功夫，把背单词的精神拿出来背诵文章。何况，并不是要求你背了之后永远牢记在心：你可以这个星期背，下个星期忘。这没有关系，相信你的大脑具有神奇的能力。背了工具箱里的文章后，你会惊讶的发现：I can think in English now！

1.?????? Proverbs

1. A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that individuality is the key to success.

2. The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s time.

3. Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

4. The classroom--not the trench--is the frontier of freedom now and forevermore.

5. Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

6. It is the purpose of education to help us become autonomous, creative, inquiring people who have the will and intelligence to create our own destiny.

7. You see, real ongoing, lifelong education doesn’t answer questions; it provokes them.

8. People will pay more to be entertained than educated.

9.the most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others. This is the basic architecture of a life; the rest is ornamentation and decoration of the structure.

10. The essence of our efforts to see that every child has a chance must be to assure each as equal opportunity, not to become equal, but to become different-to realize whatever unique potential of body, mind, and spirit he or she possesses.

11. A great teacher never strives to explain his vision-he simply invites you to stand beside him and see for yourself.

12. If you can read and don’, you are an illiterate by choice.

2. Damaging Research

A study by National Parent-Teacher Organization revealed that in the average American school, eighteen negatives are identified for every positive that is pointed out. The Wisconsin study revealed that when children enter the first grade, 80 percent of them feel pretty good themselves, but by the time they get to the sixth grade, only 10 percent of them have good self-images.

3. Education and Citizenship

An important aspect of education in the United States is the relationship between education and citizenship. Throughout its history this nation has emphasized public education as a means of transmitting democratic values, creating equality of opportunity, and preparing new generations of citizens to function in society. In addition, the schools have been expected to help shape society itself. During the 1950s, for example, efforts to combat racial segregation focused on the schools. Later, when the Soviet Union launched the first orbiting satellite, American schools and colleges came under intense pressure and were offered many incentives to improve their science and mathematics programs so that the nations would not fall behind the Soviet Union in scientific and technological capabilities.

Education is often viewed as a tool for solving social problems, especially social inequality. The schools, t is thought, can transform young people from vastly different backgrounds into competent, upwardly mobile adults. Yet these goals seem almost impossible to attain. In recent years, in fact, public education has been at the center of numerous controversies arising from the gap between the ideal and the reality. Part of the problem is that different groups in society have different have different expectations. Some feel that children should be taught basic job-related skills; still others believe education should not only prepare children to compete in society but also help them maintain their cultural identity (and, in the case of Hispanic children, their language). On the other hand, policymakers concerned with education emphasize the need to increase the level of student achievement and to improve parents in their children’s education.

Some reformers and critics have called attention to the need to link formal schooling with programs designed to address social problems. Sociologist Charles Moscos, for example, is a leader in the movement to expand programs like the Peace Corps, Vista, and Outward Bound into a system of voluntary national service. National service, as Moscos defines it, would entail “the full-time undertaking of public duties by young people whether as citizen soldiers or civilian servers-who are paid subsistence wages” and serve for at least one year. In return for this period of service, the volunteers would receive assistance in paying for college or other educational expenses.

Advocates of national service and school-to-work programs believe that education does not have to be confined to formal schooling. In devising strategies to provide opportunities for young people to serve their society, they emphasize the educational value of citizenship experiences gained outside the classroom. At this writing there is little indication that national service will become a new educational institution in the United States, although the concept is steadily gaining support among educators and social critics.

4. The Teacher’s Role

Given the undeniable importance of classroom experience, sociologists have done a considerable amount of research on what goes on in the classroom. Often they start from the premise that, along with the influence of peers, students’ experiences in the classroom are of central importance to their later development. One study examined the impact of a single first-grade teacher on her students’ subsequent adult status. The surprising results of this study have important implications. It is evident that good teachers can make a big difference in children’s lives, a fact that gives increased urgency to the need to improve the quality of primary-school teaching. The reforms carried out by educational leaders like James Comer suggest that when good teaching is combined with high levels of parental involvement the results can be even more dramatic.

Because the role of the teacher is to change the learner in some way, the teacher-student relationship is an important part of education. Sociologists have pointed out that this relationship is asymmetrical or unbalanced, with the teacher being in a position of authority and the student having little choice but to passively absorb the information provided by the teacher. In other words, in conventional classrooms there is little opportunity for the students to become actively involved in the learning process. On the other hand, students often develop strategies for undercutting the teacher’s authority: mentally withdrawing, interrupting, and the like. Hence, much current research assumes that students and teachers influence each other instead of assuming that the influence is always in a single direction.

5. Education Philosophy

For the past fifty years our schools have operated on the theories of John Dewey (1859-1953), an American educator and writer. Dewey believed hat the school’s job was to enhance the natural development of the growing child, rather than to pour information, for which the child had no context, into him or her. In the Dewey system, the child becomes the active agent in his own education, rather than a passive receptacle for facts.

Consequently, American schools are very enthusiastic about teaching “life skills” –logical thinking, analysis, creative problem--solving. The actual content of the lessons is secondary to the process, which is supposed to train the child to be able to handle whatever life may present, including all the unknowns of the future. Students and teachers both regard pure memorization as an uncreative and somewhat vulgar.

In addition to “life skills”, schools are assigned to solve the ever growing stoke of social problems. Racism, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, drug use, reckless driving, and are just a few of the modern problems that have appeared on the school curriculum.

This all contributes to a high degree of social awareness in American youngsters.

6. Student Life

To the students, the most notable difference between elementary school and the higher levels is that in junior high they start “changing classes”. This means that rather than spending the day in one classroom, they switch classrooms to meet their different teachers. This gives them three or four minutes between classes in the hallways, where a great deal of the important social action of high school traditionally takes place. Students have lockers in these hallways, around which thy congregate.

Society in general does not take the business of studying very seriously. Schoolchildren have a great deal of free time, which they are encouraged to fill with extracurricular activities—sports, clubs, cheerleading, scouts—supposed to inculcate such qualities as leadership, sportsmanship, ability to organize, etc. those who don’t become engaged in such activities or have afterschool jobs have plenty of opportunity to “hang out”, listen to teenager music, and watch television.

Compared to other nations, American students do not have much homework. Studies also show that American parents have lower expectations for their children’s success in school than other nationalities do. (Historically, there has not been much correlation between American school success and success in later life.) “He’s just not a scholar”, the American parents might say, content that their son is on the swim team and doesn’t take drugs. (Some of the young do choose to study hard, for reason of their own, such as determining that the road to riches lies through Harvard Business School.)

What American schools do effectively teach is the competitive method. In innumerable ways children are pitted against each other—whether in classroom discussion, spelling bees, reading groups, or tests. Every classroom is expected to produce a scattering of A’s and F’s (teachers often grade A=excellent; B=good; C=average; D=poor; and F=failed). A teacher who gives all A’s looks too soft—so students are aware that they are competing for the limited number of top marks.

Foreign students sometimes don’t understand that copying from other people’s papers or from books is considered wrong and taken seriously. Here, it is important to show that you have done your own work and are displaying your own knowledge. It is more important than helping your friends to pass, whom we think do not deserve to pass unless they can provide their own answers. Group effort goes against the competitive grain, and American students do not study together as many Asians do. Many Asians in this country consider their group study habits a large contributor to their school success.

7. Adult Education

After complaining about many aspects of American life, a 40-year-old woman from Hong Kong concluded, “But where else could someone my age go back to school and get a degree in social work? Here you can change your whole life, start a new business, do what you really want to do.”

So at least to this person, school requirements weren’t inhibiting. And to millions of others, adult education is the path to a new career, or if not to a new career, to a new outlook. Schools generally encourage the older person who wants to start anew, and besides regular classes, schedule evening classes in special programs. Today there are so many people of retirement age in college that it is no longer remarkable.

8. Moral Relativism in American

Improving American education requires not doing new things but doing (and remembering) some good old things. At the time of our nation’s founding, Thomas Jefferson listed the requirements for a sound education in the Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia. In this landmark statement on American education, Jefferson wrote of the importance of education and writing, and of reading history, and geography. But he also emphasized the need “to instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests, and duties, as men and citizens.” Jefferson believed education should aim at the improvement of both one’s “morals” and “faculties”. That has been the dominant view of the aims of American education for over two centuries. But a number of changes, most of them unsound, have diverted schools from these great pursuits. And the story of the loss of the school’s original moral mission explains a great deal.

Starting in the early seventies, “values clarification” programs started turning up in schools all over America. According to this philosophy, the schools were not to take part in their time-honored task of transmitting sound moral values; rather, they were to allow the child to “clarify” his own values (which adults, including parents, had no “rights” to criticize). The “values clarification” movement didn’t clarify values; it clarified wants and desires. This form of moral relativism said, in effect, that no set of values was right or wrong; everybody had an equal right to his own values; and all values were subjective, relative, and personal. This destructive view took hold with a vengeance.

In 1985 The York Times published an article quoting New York area educators, in slavish devotion to this new view, proclaiming, “They deliberately avoid trying to tell students what is ethically right and wrong.” The article told of one counseling session involving fifteen high school juniors and seniors. In the course of that session a student concluded that a fellow student had been foolish to return one thousand dollars she found in a purse at school. According to the article, when the youngsters asked the counselor’s opinion, “He told them he believed the girl had done the right thing, but that, of course, he would not try to force his values on them. ‘If I come from the position of what is wrong,’ he explained, ‘then I’m not their counselor.’”

Once upon a time, a counselor offered counselor, and he knew that an adult does not form character in the young by taking a stance of neutrality toward questions of right and wrong or by merely offering “choices” or “options”.

In response to the belief that adults and educators should teach children sound morals, one can expect from some quarters indignant objections (I’ve heard one version of it expressed countless times over the years): “Who are you to say what’s important?” or “Whose standards and judgments do we use?”

The correct response, it seems to me, is, is we ready to do away with standards and judgments? Is anyone going to argue seriously that a life of cheating and swindling is as worthy as a life of honest, hard work? Is anyone (with the exception of some literature professors at our elite universities) going to argue seriously the intellectual corollary, that a Marvel comic book is as good as Macbeth? Unless we are willing to embrace some pretty silly position, we’ve got to admit the need for moral and intellectual standards. The problem is that some people tend to regard anyone who would pronounce a definitive judgment as an unsophisticated Philistine or a closed-minded “elitist” trying to impose his view on everybody else.

The truth of the real world is that without standards and judgments, there can be no progress. Unless we are prepared to say irrational things—that nothing can be proven more valuable than anything else or that everything is equally worthless—we must ask the normative question. It may come, as a surprise to those who fell that to be “progressive” is to be value-neutral. But as Matthew Amold said, “the world is forwarded by having its attention fixed on the best things” and if the world can’t decide what the best things are, at least to some degree, then it follows that progress, and character, is in trouble. We shouldn’t be reluctant to declare that some things, some lives, books, ideas, and values are better than others. It is the responsibility of the schools to teach these better things.

At one time, we weren’t so reluctant to teach them. In the mid-nineteenth century, a diverse, widespread group of crusaders began to work for the public support of what was then called the “common school”, the forerunner of the public school. They were to be charged with the mission of school felt that the nation could fulfill its destiny only if every new generation was taught these values together in a common institution.

The leaders of the common school movement were mainly citizens who were prominent in their communities—businessmen, ministers, local civic and government officials. These people saw the schools as upholders of standards of individual morality and small incubators of civic and personal virtue; the founders of the public schools had faith that public education could teach good moral and civic character from a common ground of American values.

But in the past quarter century or so, some of the so-called experts became experts of value neutrality, and moral education was increasingly left in their hands. The commonsense view of parents and the publicthat schools should reinforce rather than undermine the values of home, family, and country, was increasingly rejected.

There are those today still that claim we are now too diverse a nation, that we consist of too many competing convictions and interests to instill common values. They are wrong. Of course we are a diverse people. We have always been a diverse people. And as Madison wrote in FederalistNo.10, the competing, balancing interests of a diverse people can help ensure the survival of liberty. But there are values that all American citizens share and that we should want all American students to know and to make their own: honesty, fairness, self-discipline, fidelity to task, friends, and family, personal responsibility, love of country, and belief in the principles of liberty, equality, and the freedom to practice one’s faith. The explicit teaching of these values is the legacy of the common schools, and it is a legacy to which we must return.

9. Schools Should Teach Values

People often said, “Yes, we should teach these values, but how do we teach them?” this question deserves a candid response, one that isn’t given often enough. It is by exposing our children to good character and inviting its imitation that we will transmit to them a moral foundation. This happens when teachers and principals, by their words and actions, embody sound convictions. As Oxford’s Mary Warnock has written, “You cannot teach morality without being committed to morality yourself; and you cannot be committed to morality yourself without holding that some things are right and others wrong.” The theologian Martin Buber wrote that the educator is distinguished from all other influences “by his will to take part in the stamping of character and by his consciousness that he represents in the eyes of the growing person a certain selection of what is, the selection of what is ‘right’, of what should be.” It is in this will, Buber says, in this clear standing for something, that the “vocation as an educator finds its fundamental expression.”

There is no escaping the fact that young people need as example principals and teachers who know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, and who themselves exemplify high moral purpose.

As Education Secretary, I visited a class at Waterbury Elementary School in Waterbury, Vermont, and asked the students, “Is this a good school?” They answered, “Yes, this is a good school.” I asked them, “Why?” Among other things, one eight-year-old said, “The principal Mr. Riegel, makes good rules and everybody obeys them.” So I said, “Give me an example.” And another answered, “You can’t climb on the pipes in the bathroom. We don’t climb on the pipes and the principal doesn’t either.”

This example is probably too simple to please a lot of people who want to make the topic of moral education difficult, but there is something profound in the answer of those children, something education should pay more attention to. You can’t expect children to take messages about rules or morality seriously unless they see adults taking those rules seriously in their day-to-day affairs. Certain must be said, certain limits lay down, and certain examples set. There is no other way.

We should also do a better job at curriculum selection. The research shows that most “values education” exercises and separate courses in “moral reasoning” tend not to affect children’s behavior; if anything, they may leave children morally adrift. Where to turn? I believe our literature and our history are a rich quarry of moral literacy. We should mine that quarry. Children should have at their disposal a stock of examples illustrating what we believe to be right and wrong, good and bad—examples illustrating what are morally right and wrong can indeed be known and that there is a difference.

What kind of stories, historical events, and famous lives am I talking about? If we want our children to know about honesty, we should teach them about Abe Lincoln walking three miles to return six cents and conversely, about Aesop’s shepherd boy who cried wolf if we want them to know about courage, we should teach them about Joan of Arc, Horatius at the bridge, and Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. If we want them to know about persistence in the face of adversity, they should know about the voyages of Columbus and the character of Washington during the Civil War. And our youngest should be told about the Little Engine That Could. If we want them to know about respect for the law, they should understand why Socrates told Crito: “No, I must submit to the decree of Athens.” If we want our children to respect the rights of others, they should read the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’ “Letter from Birmingham jail.” From the Bible they should know about Ruth’s loyalty to Naomi, Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers, Jonathan’s friendship with David, the Good Samaritan’s kindness toward a stranger, and David’s cleverness and courage in facing Goliath.

These are only a few of the hundreds of examples we can call on. And we need not get into issues like nuclear war, abortion, creationism, or euthanasia. This may come as a disappointment to some people, but the fact is that the formation of character in young people is educationally a task different from, and prior to, the discussion of the great, difficult controversies of the day. First things come first. We should teach values the same way we teach other things: one step at a time. We should not use the fact that there are many difficult and controversial moral questions as an argument against basic instruction in the subject.

After all, we do not argue against teaching physics because laser physics is difficult, against teaching American history because there are heated disputes about the Founders’ intent. Every field has its complexities and its controversies. And every field has its basics, its fundamentals. So they are too with forming character and achieving moral literacy. As any parent knows, teaching character is a difficult task. But it is a crucial task, because we want our children to be healthy, happy, and successful but decent, strong, and good. None of this happens automatically; there is no genetic transmission of virtue. It takes the conscious, committed efforts of adults. It takes careful attention.

10. College Pressures

Mainly I try to remind that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. They don not want to hear such liberating news. They want a map—right now – that they can follow unswervingly to career security, financial security, Social Security and, presumably, a prepaid grave.

What I wish for all students is some release from the clammy grip of the future. I wish them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a grim preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world.

My wish, of course, is na?ve. One of the national gods venerated in our media—the million-dollar athlete, the wealthy executive—and glorified in our praise of possessions. In the presence of such a potent state religion, the young are growing up old.

I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure. It is easy to look around for villains—to blame the colleges for charging too much money, the professors for assigning too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, and the students for driving themselves too hard. But there are no villains: only victims.

“In the late 1960s.” one dean told me. “The typical question that I got from students was ‘Why is there so much suffering in the world’ or ‘how I can make a contribution?’ Today it’s ‘Do you think it would look better for getting into law school if I did a double major in history and political science, or just majored in one of them?’” many other deans confirmed this pattern. One said: “They are trying to find an edge—the intangible something that will look better on paper if two students are about equal.”

Note the emphasis on looking better. The transcript has become a sacred document, the passport to security. How one appears on paper is more important than how one appears in person. A is for Admirable and B is for Borderline, even though, in Yale’s official system of grading, A means “excellent” and B means “very good.” Today, looking very good is no longer good enough, especially for students who hope to go on to law school or medical school. They know that entrance into the better schools will be an entrance into the better law firms and better medical practices where they will make a lot of money. They also know that the odds are harsh. Yale Law School, for instance, matriculates 170students from an applicant pool of 3,700; Harvard enrolls 550 from a pool of 7,000.

It’s all very well for those of us who write letters of recommendation for our students to stress the qualities of humanity that will make them good lawyers or doctors. And it’s nice to think that admission officers are ready reading our letters and looking for the extra dimension of commitment or concern. Still, it would be hard for a student not to visualize these officers shuffling so many transcripts studded with As that they regard a B as positively shameful.

The pressure is almost as heavy on students who just want to graduate and get a job. Long gone are the days of the “gentleman’s C.” when students journeyed through college with a certain relaxation, sampling a wide variety of courses-music, art, philosophy, classics, anthropology, poetry, religion—that would send them out as liberally educated men and women. If I were an employer I would rather employ graduates who have this range and curiosity than those who narrowly pursued safe subjects and high grades. I know countless students whose inquiring minds exhilarate me. I like to hear the play of their ideas. I do not know if they are getting As or Cs, and I do not care. I also like them as people. The country needs them, and they will find satisfying jobs. I tell them to relax. They cannot.

Nor can I blame them. They live in a brutal economy. Tuition, room, and board at most private colleges now come to at least $7,000, not counting books and fees. This might seem to suggest that the colleges are getting rich. But they are equally battered by inflation. Tuition covers only 60 percent of what it costs to educate a student, and ordinarily the remainder comes from what college receives in endowments, grants, and gifts. Now, the remainder keeps being swallowed by the cruel costs—higher every year—of just opening the doors. Heating oil is up. Insurance is up. Postage is up. Health-premium costs are up. Everything is up. Deficits are up. We are witnessing in American the creation of a brotherhood of paupers—colleges, parents, and students, joined by the common bond of debt.

Today it is not unusual for a student, even if he works part time at college and full time during the summer, to accrue $5,000 in loans after four years—loans that he must start to repay within one year after graduation. Exhorted at commencement to go forth into the world, he is already behind as he goes forth. How could he not feel under pressure throughout college to prepare for this day of reckoning? I have used “he,” incidentally, only for brevity. Women at Yale are under no less pressure to justify their expensive education to themselves, their parents, and society. In fact, they are probably under more pressure. For although they leave college superbly equipped to bring fresh leadership to traditionally male jobs, society has not yet caught up with this fact.

Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined.

I see many students taking pre-medical courses with joyless tenacity. They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know tem in other corners of their life as cheerful people.

“Do you want to medical school?” I asked them.

“I guess so,” they say, without conviction, or “Not really.”

“Then why are you going?”

“Well, my parents want me to be a doctor. They are paying all this money and …”

Poor students, poor parents, they are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. The parents mean will; they are trying to steer their sons and draughts toward a secure future. But the sons and daughter want to major in history or classics or philosophy—subjects with no “practical” value. Where’s the payoff on the humanities? It’s not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do indeed pay off. The intellectual faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classics—an ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspective—are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field. Still, many fathers would rather put their money on courses that point toward specific profession—courses that are pre-law, pre-medical, pre-business, or, as I sometimes heard it put, “pre-rich.”

But the pressure on students is severe. They are truly torn. One part of them feels obliged to fulfill their parents’ expectations; after all, their parents are older and presumably wiser. Another part tells them that the expectations that are right for their parents are not right for them.

I know a student who wants to be an artist. She is very obviously an artist and will be a good one—she has already had several modest local exhibits. Meanwhile she is growing as a well-round person and taking humanistic subjects that will enrich the inner resources out of which her art will grow. But her father is strongly opposed. He thinks that an artist is a “dumb” thing to be. The student vacillates and tries to please everybody. She keeps up with her art somewhat furtively and takes some of the “dumb” courses her father wants her to take—at least they are dumb courses for her. She is a free spirit on a campus of tense students—no small achievement in it—and she deserves to follow her muse.

Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year.

“I had a freshman student I’ll call Linda,” one dean told me, “who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time. I could not tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda.”

The story is almost funny—except that it is not. It is symptomatic of all the pressure put together. When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they would sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the clacking of typewriters in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: “Will I get everything done?”

Probably they won’t. They will get blocked. They will sleep. They will oversleep. They will bug out.

Part of the problem is that they are expected to do. A professor will assign five page papers. Several students will start writing ten page papers to impress him. Then more students will write ten page papers, and a few will raise the ante to fifteen. Pity the poor student who is still just doing the assignment.

“Once you have twenty or thirty percent of the student population deliberately overexerting,” one dean points out, “It’s bad for everybody. When a teacher gets more and more effort from his class, the student who is doing normal work can be perceived as not doing well. The tactic work, psychologically.”

Why cannot the professor just cut back and not accept longer papers? He can, and he probably will. But by then the term will be half over and the damage done. Grade fever is highly contagious and not easily reversed. Besides, the professor’s main concern is with his course. He knows his students only in relation to the course and does not know that they are also overexerting in their other courses. Nor is it really his business. He did not sign up for dealing with the student as a whole person and with all the emotional baggage the student brought along from home. That’s what deans, masters, chaplains, and psychiatrists are for.

To some extent this is nothing new: a certain number of professors have always been self-contained islands of scholarship and shyness, more comfortable with books than with people. But the new pauperism has widened the gap still further, for professors who actually like to spend time with students do not have as much time to spend. They are also overexerting. If they are young, they are busy trying to publish in order not to perish, hanging by their figure nails onto a shrinking profession.

If they are old and tenured, they are buried under the duties of administering departments—as departmental chairmen or members of committees—that have been thinned out by the budgetary axe.

Ultimately it will be the students’ own business to break the circles in which they are trapped. They are too young to be prisoners of their parents’ dreams and their classmates’ fears. They must be jolted into believing into themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future.

“Violence is being done to the undergraduate experience,” says Carlos Hortas. “College should be open-ended: at the end it should open many, many roads. Instead, students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choices narrow as they go along. It’s almost as if they think that the country has been codified in the type of jobs that exist-that they’ve got to fit into certain slots. Therefore, fit into the best paying slot.”

“They ought to take chances. Not taking chances will lead to life of colorless mediocrity. They’ll be comfortable. But something in the spirit will be missing.”

I have painted too drab a portrait of today’s students, making them seem a solemn lot. That is only half of their story; if they were so dreary I wouldn’t so thoroughly enjoy their company. The other half is that they are easy to like. They are quick to laugh and to offer friendship. They are not introverts. They are usually kind and are more considerate of one another than any student generation I have known.

Nor are they so obsessed with their studies that they avoid sports and extracurricular activities. On the contrary, they juggle their crowded hours to play on a variety of teams, perform with musical and dramatic groups, and write for campus publications. But this in turn is one more cause of anxiety. There are too many choices. Academically, they have 1,300 courses to select from; outside class they have to decide how much spare time they can spare and how to spend it.

This means that they engage in fewer extracurricular pursuits than their predecessors did. If they want to row on the crew and play in the symphony they will eliminate one; in the ‘60s they would have done both. They also tend to choose activities that are self-limiting. Drama, for instance, is flourishing in all twelve of Yale’s residential colleges, as it never has before. Students hurl themselves into these productions—as actors, directors, carpenters, and technicians—with a dedication to create the best possible play, knowing that the day will come when the run will end and they can get back to their studies.

They also cannot afford to be the willing slave of organizations like the Yale Daily News. Last spring at the one-hundredth anniversary banquet of that paper—who’s past chairmen include such once and future kings as Potter Stewart, Kingman Brewster, and William F. Buckley, Jr.—much was made of the fact that the editorial staff used to be small and totally committed and that “newsies” routinely worked fifty hours a week. In effect they belonged to a club; Newsies is how they defined themselves at Yale. Today’s students will one or two articles a week, when he can, and he defines himself as a student. I’ve never heard the word Newsie except at the banquet.

If I have described the modern undergraduate primarily as a driven creature who is largely ignoring the blithe spirit inside who keeps trying to come out and play, it’s because that’s where the crunch is, not only at Yale but throughout American education. It’s why I think we should all be worried about the values that are nurturing a generation so fearful of risk and so goal-obsessed at such an early age.

I tell students that there is no one “right” way to get ahead—that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and bound for a different destination. I tell neither them that change is a tonic and that all the slots are not codified nor the frontiers closed. One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and women who have achieved success outside the academic world to come and talk informally with my students during the year. They are heads of companies or ad agencies, editors of magazines, politicians, public officials, television magnates, labor leaders, business executives, Broadway products, artists, writers, economists, photographers, scientists, historians—a mixed bag of achievers.

I asked them to say a few words about how they got started. The students assume that they started in their present profession and knew all along that it was what they wanted to do. Luckily for me, most of them got into their field by a circuitous route, to their surprise, after many detours. The students are startled. They can hardly conceive of a career that was not pre-planned. They can hardly imagine allowing the hand of God or chance to nudge them down some unforeseen trail.

11. To Err Is Wrong

In the summer of 1979, Boston Red Sox first baseman Carl Yastrzemski became the fifteenth player in baseball history to reach the three thousand hit plateaus. This event drew a lot of media attention, and for about a week prior to the attainment of this goal, hundreds of reports covered Yaz’s every more. Finally, one reporter asked, “Hey Yaz, aren’t you afraid all of this attention will go to your head?” Yastrzemski replied, “I look at this way: in my career I’ve been up to bat over ten thousand times. That means I’ve been unsuccessful at the plate over seven thousand times. That fact alone keeps me from getting a swollen head.”?

Most people consider success and failure as opposites, but they are actually both products of the same process. As Yaz suggest, an activity that produces a hit may also produce a miss. It is the same with creative thinking; the same energy that generates good creative ideas also produces errors.

Many people, however, are not comfortable with errors. Our educational system, based on “the right answer” belief, cultivates our thinking in another, more conservative way. From an early age, we are taught that right answers are good and incorrect answers are bad. This value is deeply embedded in the incentive system used in most schools:

Right over 90% of the time = “A”

Right over 80% of the time = “B~”

Right over 70% of the time = “C~” Right over 60% of the time = “D~” Less than 60% correct, you fail.

From this we learn to be right as often as possible and to keep our mistakes to a minimum. We learn, in other words, that “to err is wrong.

Playing It Safe

With this kind of attitude, you aren’t going to be taking too many chances. If you learn that failing even a litter penalizes you (e.g., being wrong only 15% of the time garners you only a “B” performance), you learn not to make mistakes. And more important, you learn not to put yourself to situation where you might fall. This leads to conservative thought pattern designed to avoid the stigma our society puts on “failure”.

I have a friend who recently graduated from college with a Master’s degree in Journalism. For the last six month, she has been trying to find a job, but to no avail. I talked with her about situation, and realized that her problem is that she doesn’t know how to fail. She went through eighteen years of schooling to try any approaches where she might fail. She has been conditioned to believe that failure is bad in and of itself, rather than a potential stepping-stone to new ideas.

Look around. How many middle managers, housewives, administrators, teachers, and other people do you see who are to try anything new because of this failure? Most of us have learned not to make mistakes in public. As a result, we remove ourselves from many learning experience except for those occurring in the most private of circumstances.

Different Logic

From a practical point of view, “to err is wrong” makes sense. Our survival in the everyday world requires us to perform thousand of small tasks without failure. Think about it: you wouldn’t last very long if you were to step out in front of traffic or stick your hand a pot of boiling water. In addition, engineers whose bridges collapse, stock brokers who lose money for their clients, and copywriters whose ad campaigns decrease sales won’t keep their jobs very long.

Nevertheless, too great an adherence to the belief “to err is wrong” can greatly undermine your attempts to generate new ideas. If you are more concerned with producing right answers than generating original ideas, you’ll probably make uncritical use of the rules, formulae, and procedures used to obtain these right answers. By doing this, you’ll by-pass the germinal phase of the creative process, and thus spend litter time testing assumptions, challenging the rules, asking what-if questions, or just playing around with the problem. All of these techniques will produce some incorrect answers, but in the germinal phase errors are viewed as a necessary by-product of creative thinking. As Yaz would put it, “if you want the hits, be prepared for the misses.” That’s the way the game of life goes.

Errors as Stepping Stones

Whenever an error pops up, the usual response is “Jeez, another screw up, what went wrong this time?” the creative thinker, on the other hand, will realize the potential value of errors, and perhaps say something like, “Would you look at that! Where can it lead our thinking?” and then he or she will go on to use the error as a stepping stone to a new idea. As a matter of fact, the whole history of discovery is filed with people who used erroneous assumptions and failed ideas as stepping-stones to new ideas. Columbus thought he was finding a shorter route to India. Johannes Kepler stumbled on to the idea of interplanetary gravity because of assumptions that were right for the wrong reasons. And, Thomas Edison knew 1800 ways not to build a light bulb.

The following story about the automotive genius Charles Kettering exemplifies the spirit of working through erroneous assumptions to good ideas. In 1912, when the automobile industry was just beginning to grow, Kettering was interested in improving gasoline engine efficiency. The problem he faced was“knockthe phenomenon in which gasoline takes too long to burn in the cylinder-thereby reducing efficiency.

Kettering began searching for ways to eliminate the “knock.” He thought to him, “How can I get the gasoline to combust in the cylinder at an earlier time?” the key concept here is “early”. Searching for analogous situations, he looked around for models of “things that happen early.” He thought of historical models, physical models, and biological models. Finally, he remembered a particular plant, the trailing arbutus, which “happens early,” i.e., it blooms in the snow (“earlier” than other plants). One of this plant’s chief characteristics is its’ red leaves, which help the plant retain light at certain wavelengths. Kettering figured that it must be the red color, which made the trailing arbutus bloom earlier.

Now came the critical step in Kettering’s chain of thought. He asked himself, “How can I make the gasoline red?” perhaps I’ll put red dye in the gasoline—maybe that’ll make it combust earlier.” He looked around his workshop, and found that he didn’t have any red dye. But he did happen to have some iodine—perhaps that would do. He added the iodine to the gasoline and, lo and behold, the engine didn’t “knock”.

[英语作文写作的需要背诵的部分

熟悉公文的基本格式

公文写作和文章写作有着千丝万缕的联系，但二者也有着极其大的差别，公文写作非常注重写作的格式，因为公务文书有一个显着的特征--规范的体式。这也就给广大考生提供了一个明确的信号，在复习备考公文写作题时一定要注意公务文书的基本格式，比如公务文书的三大组成部分(眉首、主体、版记)以及每个部分中所包含的一些基本要素(如：发文字号、标题、主送机关、成文日期、附件等)。尤其要注意每一个部分的特别之处，比如发文字号的书写格式，标题的书写规范，成文日期的书写规范以及位置要求等等，掌握好了这些基本的格式要求之后，我们写作的公文就做到了“形似”。

熟悉每个文种的例文

有人说过这样一句话：“天下公文一大抄”，这句话或许存在一定的夸大成分，但更多地是给我们提供了一个备考方略--通过熟悉例文掌握公文写作。在熟悉了公文的基本格式以后我们能做到“形似”，但是要让写作的公文更加符合题目要求，得到更高的分数，考生在写作公文时还要让公文符合特定文种的一些基本特点，在形似的基础上做到特色突出。而要突出特色就要对每种文种进行深入的了解，熟悉例文是深入理解具体文种特色的最直接有效地途径。

注意特殊用语

公文写作过程中注意了前面两个方面，可以保障写出的文章没有形式上的错误或者问题，但要想得到高分特别是要和其他考生拉开差距更多地是要做到“神似”，这时候就要注意每种文种的特殊用语，比如请示的结束语使用错误就很容易形成扣分点，把“妥否，请批示”写成“妥否，请批准”，一字之差，语气就有天壤之别，得分也会有非常明显的差距。所以在备考公文写作的过程中一定要注意公文当中的特殊用语，这是公文达到神似的基础要求。

注意语言风格

许多考生在备考公文写作时也注意写作训练，希望通过多写多练来提高分数，这种做法值得表扬，但是在写作训练时一定要注意公文写作的文体要求，即公文的表达方式和语体特征。公文的表达方式包括叙述、说明、议论，以说明为主，在公文写作过程中一般不会使用抒情的表达方式，而有些考生在写作公文时神采飞扬，大发感慨，这样就违背了公文写作在表达方式上的要求;公文的语体特征是准确、简明、庄重、得体，一般不会出现网络流行词或者是新闻式的词语，而有些考生为了体现自己的与时俱进，在写作公文时大量使用时髦词语如“亲”“给力”等等，则违背了公文在语体特征上的要求。所以在写作公文时一定要使用规范的语言，或者使用“官方”语言，这样才会让我们写作的公文更加符合公文的“神”，也才更加符合考试的要求，也才能获得高分。

那么，到底什么是应用文呢?

关于应用文的概念， 1979 年上海辞书出版社出版的《辞海》的解释是：应用文是人们在日常生活、工作和学习中所应用的简易通俗文字，包括书信、公文、契约、启事、条据等。定义很简单，但没能概括出应用文的本质特征，仅仅指出应用文的“简易通俗”，这才只是应用文的一些方面，而不是全部特征。

根据国务院办公厅颁布的《国家行政机关公文处理办法》中对公文的定义，推广开来，应用文的定义应为：应用文是机关团体、企事业单位以及人民群众在日常工作、生产和生活中办理公务以及个人事务时，交流情况、沟通信息，具有直接实用价值和惯用格式的一种书面交际工具。这个定义规定了应用文的本质特征，使它明显区别于其他文体，又涵盖了应用文的基本特性。

应用文的起源至迟可以追溯到殷商社会晚期，也就是距今 3000 多年前，可以说我国有初步定型文字的最初年代也就伴随着有了应用文的使用。殷墟出土的甲骨卜辞，商周时期的钟鼎文，《周易》中的卦、爻辞等，都是应用文的原始形态。所以，如果说，神话是中国文学的“祖先”，那么甲骨文则是应用文的“祖先”了。

应用文的使用非常广泛，几乎涉及各个领域、各个部门、各个阶层、每个个人。比如，科研单位的人员，需要用学术论文;政府机关指导工作，需要用公文;工商企业经营，需要用合同;打官司，需要用诉状;即使个人今天生病了、不能上课，也需要用到请假条;……。相对于其它文体来说，应用文的使用频率要高得多：许多人可以一辈子不写小说、剧本、诗歌、散文，但他在工作、生活、学习中却免不了要写应用文，小到写张请假条，大到计划、总结、论文等。正如 叶圣陶 先生所说的那样：“大学毕业生不一定能写小说诗歌，但是一定要能写工作和学习中实用的文章，而且非写得既通顺又扎实不可。”

可以这么说，应用文使用的广泛，已经到了无所不在的程度。今天在中国特色的社会主义市场经济条件下，应用文是任何企事业单位和个人日常工作、生活中不可缺少的一个重要工具。

应用文同别的文体比较，有共性，也有个性。共性是他们都是对客观事物的反映，都要谋篇布局、用词造句、使用标点符号，讲究条理性、逻辑性，同样使用叙述、说明、议论等表达方式，要求准确、鲜明、生动的文风。具体表现在以下几方面。

教学内容：

第一节 应用文的主题

应用文写作基础知识既有与一般文体写作的共通之处，更多的是其在写作知识运用上的独特性，只有掌握其独特性，才能正确、规范地写好应用文体。

主题先行性

一、主题的特点 主题单一性

主题显露性

应用文的主题就是解决问题的方法、建议。其主题是十分明确直接的，主题的确立大多不是写作者有感而发，而是应客观实际的需要，为解决实际问题而产生的，由此可以说应用文主题就是解决问题的具体方法。因此应用文的主题具有以下特点：

文学作品的主题是从生活中、从已获取的材料中提炼出来的，往往反对主题先行。而应用文主题的确立与文学作品主题的确立不同，其主题确立在全文写作之前，所谓“意在笔先”。因为应用文总是先产生了具体问题而后产生写作的需求，而解决这一问题的方法、结论往往也产生在文章写作之前;同时执笔者的写作行为往往也是被动的，是应解决问题而动笔，写作的过程更是确切地体现主题。如《国务院关于同意黑龙江省调整哈尔滨市部分行政区划的批复》一文就是为答复《调整哈尔滨市部分行政区划的请示》而写的文章，表示同意请示提出的请求事项而作，主题一定是确立在写作之前。

一般说文学作品的主题具有其复杂性，对主题的理解更呈多元化。然而应用文的主题则必须单一、明确，读者对主题的理解不允许多元，而要求理解上的同一性，这样才利于统一认识，更有利于问题的解决。如：《关于当代青年消费问题的调查报告》一文就消费观念、消费现状、消费趋势和消费结构等四个方面，展开调查，尽管涉及面广，材料较丰富，但文章紧紧围绕“当代青年消费”这一中心，内容集中，一题一议，主题单一、明确。

文学作品的主题要求含蓄、曲折，令人回味。而应用文写作就不同，要求直截了当地点明主题，表明态度，提出解决问题的措施和办法，对文章所涉及的各类问题，必须有明确的观点立场，应该怎么做，解决什么问题，达到什么目的，都要明确地表达出来。

标题显旨

二、主题的表现方法 开头点旨

结尾点旨

应用文主题的表达要做到明确、显露。那么怎么才能做到主题从文章中显露出来呢?下面就给大家介绍几种表现方法：

标题显旨，就是在文章的标题中直接点明主题。如《三季度物价水平再次转降，出口增速趋于稳定》，这篇经济活动分析报告的标题就直接点明了主题，让人一看就大致明白了文章的主要内容，主题十分显露。这不失为是一种使主题显现的好方法。

这种方式是在文章的开头或每一段落的开头用简短的语句陈述主题，使主题凸现出来。如《 2001 年经济形势展望》一开头就指出： “展望 2001 年，经济回升的势头还比较微弱，促进经济的持续向好仍然需要克服许多困难。” 开宗明义，点明主题。再如《靠名牌赢得市场——关于深圳市飞亚达(集团)股份有限公司的调查》一文在 “启示：现代企业必须重视实施名牌战略” 的小标题下，分三段来阐述这一问题，在每段开头用段首句点明主旨：第一段的段 首句： 实施名牌战略是提高产品质量、提升企业品味的内在要求。 第二段的段首句： 实施名牌战略是企业参与市场竞争尤其是国际市场竞争的客观需要。 第三段的段首句： 实施名牌战略是增强国家经济实力的重要手段。 在这三句主题句的提示下，每段的中心就十分明了。

这种方式是在文章的的结尾之处点明文章主题。如李政道的论文《基础、应用科学与生产三者关系》一文就是采用这一方法结尾。文章的结尾指出： “我再重复一下，没有基础学科就没有应用学科，没有应用学科就没有生产学科，三者是紧密结合在一起的。” 非常清晰地显示了主题。

主题决定材料的选取

三、主题的作用 主题决定文种的选用

主题决定结构的安排

主题决定表达方式的选用

实训：

根据下面材料概括出主题，并用主题句表现出来。

1 .目前，全世界的年教育经费已超过 2000 亿美元，在公共资金的支出中仅次于军事经费，占第二位。世界工业化国家人口只占世界人口约三分之一，其教育经费比发展中国家多十倍以上。中国人口占世界总数超过五分之一，但教育经费仅占约三十分之一。按 1982 年的数字算，人均教育费为 11.2 元人民币，属世界 14 个人均教育经费不足 5 美元的国家之一。

2 .国外有两家鞋厂，各派一位推销员到太平洋某岛国去推销本厂的鞋子。上岛后不久，他们各发回一份电报。一位的电文是：“此岛上的人都不穿鞋，明天我就回去。”另一位的电文是：“太好了!这个岛上的人都没穿上鞋子，我打算长驻此岛。”

图画作文是近年大学英语四级写作中出现频率较高的一类文体,考生要特别加以重视。众所周知，题目所给出的图画必然反映了一定的社会现实或者揭露出某种社会现象。相比其他的文体而言，这类作文难度较大，既要求考生通过文字形式分析出图画内容，又要将图中所包含的的思想内容准确地表达出来。为此，应届毕业生网就此类作文写作步骤予以如下几方面的指导和点拨。

一、审题立意

四级作文写作过程中最关键的步骤就是审题，不仔细审题就会很容易使作文跑题，因此这是必不可少的第一步。此步骤要注意两点：一是分析题目和图画，确定文章的命题类型，抓住中心思想，联想此作文要求的写作主题。二是进一步确定给定的题材及此作文要考查的重点内容。也就是说，通过审题，考生要对作文谈论的主要话题心中有数。

二、组织结构

审题之后，根据分析的结果草拟提纲并组织安排段落，确定文章的整体结构。一般而言，考生可将图画作文转化为三段式提纲作文。开始段描述图画内容；中间段解释图画所反映出来的深层意义；结尾段引出结论，总结全文。各段的主题句要条理清晰，以使自己要表达的内容有更好的把握。每段的重点都应集中于描述图画规定的内容。选用的词句应紧扣图画主题、突出重点、前后连贯、表达清楚。

三、检查修改

考试过程中，很多考生由于紧张、仓促等原因，很容易犯一些简单的错误。因此，最后留出几分钟时间来修改所写内容是很有必要的。然而，切忌大幅度地对作文惊醒修改，因为这样会破坏卷面整洁，影响阅卷老师对试卷的印象。修改时可以从两点着手：

语法方面。包括时态是正确、名词单复数是否对应、被动主动语态是否正确、主谓是否一致等。

词汇方面。包括连接上下句或段落的关联词、固定搭配、及物不及物动词的使用、习惯用语是否使用正确等。同时，单词拼写错误和标点误用都是扣分点，考生应尽量避免此类错误。

综上所述，四级写作需要遵循上述步骤，即审题立意、组织结构、检查修改。祝考生顺利通关！

一. 肯定不如否定好

修辞的使用在书面表达中算作很大的亮点，在高中阶段很少有学生会注重修辞的应用。

双重否定也是种修辞，而且对于考生来说，只要稍加注意，可以在文章中设计双重否定的句子。

例如想表达“邮递员天天准时到”，如果写成The postman comes on time every day，就不如变成双重否定，The postman never fails to come on time，就变成了亮点句，起到强调作用。

“几乎每个人对生活的态度都不同程度受到地震的影响”，写成双重否定There was hardly a man or a woman whose attitude towards life had not been affected by the earthquake.

应用类似的修辞会在中为同学们加分。

二. 陈述不如倒装妙

在书面表达中阅卷老师喜欢看到的高级语法共有五种：倒装，强调，从句，独立主格和分词结构，以及虚拟语气。

倒装是一种最简单易行的使句子呈现亮点的方法。在高中阶段只需掌握倒装的四种形式，就足以应对书面表达。