自考英语写作重点（热门20篇）

清明，是24节气之一，是中国的流传千年传统节日，我想，在每一个人的心中，它都有着不一样的含义。它的由来很耐人寻味。

Qingming Festival, is one of the 24 solar terms, is Chinas thousands of years of traditional festivals, I think, in each persons heart, it has a different meaning. Its origins are quite afford much food for thought.

清明节与春秋五霸晋文公重耳有关。重耳耳垂大，肋骨是连在一起的，一只眼睛里有两个眸子。晋国内乱，公子夷吾和重耳逃亡在外。公子夷吾杀太子自封晋惠公，对他更加无礼，重耳只好带着狐偃、狐毛、介子推等人去投奔齐国，在途中公子重耳因连日吃野草，发病了，奄奄一息，可在荒山野岭中哪有大夫?为了就自己主公，介子推割下身上的一块大腿肉生火做汤，把肉汤送给重耳，他的病好了。

The Qingming Festival is associated with the spring and Autumn Annals chonger. One ear, the ribs are linked together, one eye in two eyes. The civil strife, Wu and his son in exile. Who killed the prince - Wu Jin Hui Gong, more rude to him, he had to take the Huyan, fox fur, Jie et al to Qi, on the way to one of the princes due to days of eating weeds, disease, be at ones last gasp, but in the wild hills where the doctor? In order to his master, the muon push to cut a piece of thigh meat fire off the soup, broth gave Chonger, his disease.

他到了秦国，在秦穆公的帮助下回了晋国做了晋文公，国家建立之后，晋文公把手下的有功之臣都封了官，有人告诉他那肉汤是介子推的肉，说重耳忘记给介子推封官了。于是他后悔忘了给介子推封，可是现在六部的尚书都有人做了，他去请介子推去做官，谁知介子推隐居绵山，文公不忘本，就亲自去绵山请他，但是就是找不到他。

He went to Qin, Qin Mugong help next time in the Jin Jin, after the establishment of Jin State, his meritorious official seal, someone told him that the broth is muon push meat, that he forgot to give demonstration of the muon push. So he regrets that he forgot to muon push email, but now six of the book is done, he went to please muon push an official, who knows the meson pushes in Mianshan, Wen did not forget, then went Mianshan to please him, but I could not find him.

有人出了一个馊主意：烧山必他出来。但是介子推和老母就是不出来，后来两个人抱着两棵老柳烧死了。文公命一看追悔莫及，下令举国哀悼介子推，把绵山重新命名介山，规定每年的这一天全国不许用火，并要插柳，还将4月5号命名为清明，又称寒食节。

Someone out of a bad idea: burning mountain will him out. But Jie Zitui and mother is not out, then two people holding the two old tree willow. Wen Gongs life at her mourning, ordered the muon push, to rename the Mianshan medium mountain, stipulated every year on this day the no fire, and must be inserted Liu, also named April 5th as the Qingming Festival, also known as.

两千年来，我们中国人很重视这个节日，在清明节这一天家家不动火，只吃一些隔天的菜或青团之类的。近来我国又把它定为法定假日。让人们有时间去祭祖、扫墓、踏青。

In two thousand years, we the Chinese people attach great importance to this holiday, during the Ching Ming Festival this day every family does not get angry, just eat some vegetables such as green or the next day. Recently, our country had made it a statutory holiday. Give people time to worship ancestors, sweep the tombs, outing.

清明节，标示着中国千百年来的一个传统，说明中国人是讲义气的，重感情的，中国人有恩不忘。

The Qingming Festival, marked by a tradition for thousands of years in China, shows that the Chinese people is the sense of obligation, the feelings of the Chinese people did not forget, grace.

以下是短文写作中使用率最高、覆盖面最广的基本句式，每组句式的功能相同或相似，考可根据自己的情况选择其中的个，做到能够熟练正确地仿写或套用。

1．表示原因

1）There are three reasons for this

2）The reasons for this are as follows

3）The reason for this is obvious

4）The reason for this is not far to seek

5）The reason for this is that

6）We have good reason to believe that

例如：

There are three reasons for the changes that have taken place in our life

．Firstly，people’s living standard has been greatly improved．Secondly，most people are well paid，and they can afford what they need or like．Last but not least，more and more people prefer to enjoy modern life．

注：

如考生写第一个句子没有把握，

可将其改写成两个句子。

如：

Great changes have taken place in our life．

There are three reasons for this．这样写可以避免套用中的表达失误。

2．表示好处

1）It has the following advantages

2）It does us a lot of good

3）It benefits us quite a lot

4）It is beneficial to us

5）It is of great benefit to us

例如：

Books are like friends．

They can help us know the world better，and they can open our minds

and widen our horizons．Therefore reading extensively is of great benefit to us

3．表示坏处

1）It has more disadvantages than advantages

2）It does us much harm

3）It is harmful to us

例如：

However，everything divides into two．

Television can also be harmful to us．It can do harm to our health and make us lazy if we spend too much time watching television.

4．表示重要、必要、困难、方便、可能

1）It is important（necessary，difficult，convenient, possible）for sb．to do sth．

2）We think it necessary to do sth．

3）It plays an important role in our life．

例如：

Computers are now being used everywhere，whether in the government，in schools or in business．

Soon, computers will be found in every home，too．

We have good reason to say that computers are playing an increasingly important role in our life and we have stepped into the Computer Age．

5．表示措施

1)We should take some effective measures．

2）We should try our best to overcome（conquer）the difficulties．

3）We should do our utmost in doing sth．

4）We should solve the problems that we are confronted（faced）with．

例如：

The housing problem that we are confronted with Is becoming more and more serious．Therefore，we must take some effective measures to solve it．

6 ．表示变化

1）Some changes have taken place in the past five years．

2)A great change will certainly be produced in the world’s communications．

3）The computer has brought about many changes in education．

例如：

Some changes have taken place in people’s diet in the past five years．The major reasons for these changes are not far to seek．Nowadays，more and more people are switching from grain to

meat for protein，and from fruit and vegetable to milk for vitamins．

7．表示事实、现状

1）We cannot ignore the fact that．．．

2）No one can deny the fact that．．．

3）There is no denying the fact that．．．

4）This is a phenomenon that many people are interested in．

5）However，that’s not the case．

例如：

We cannot ignore the fact that industrialization brings with it the problems of pollution．To solve these problems，

we can start by educating the public about the hazards of pollution．

The government on its part should also design stricter laws to promote a cleaner environment．

8．表示比较

1）Compared with A，B．．．

2）I prefer to read rather than watch TV．

3）There is a striking contrast between them．

例如：

Compared with cars ,bicycles have several advantages besides being affordable．Firstly，they do not consume natural resources of petroleum．Secondly，they do not cause the pollution problem．Last but not least，they contribute to people’s health by giving them due physical exercise．

9．表示数量

1）It has increased（decreased）from．．．to．．．

2）The population in this city has now increased （decreased）to 800，000．

3）The output of July in this factory increased by 15％compared with that of January．

例如：

With the improvement of the living standard,the proportion of people’s in some spent on food has decreased while that spent on education has increased．

再如：From the graph listed above,it can be seen that student use of computers has increased from an average of less than two hours per week in 1990 to 20 hours in 2000．

10．表示看法

1）People have（take，adopt，assume)different attitudes towards sth．

2）People have different opinions on this problem．

3）People take different views of（on）the question．

4）Some people believe that．．．

Others argue that．．．

例如：

People have different attitudes towards failure．Some believe that failure leads to success．

Every failure they experience translates into a greater chance of success at their renewed endeavor．However ,others are easily discouraged by failures and put themselves into the category of losers．

再如：

Do“lucky numbers really bring good luck？

Different people have different views on it（注：

一个段落有时很适宜以问句开始，考生应掌握这一写作方法。）

11．表示结论

1）In short，it can be said that ．．．

2）It may be briefly summed up as follows．

3）From what has been mentioned above,we can come to the conclusion that ．．

例如：

From what has been mentioned above，we can come to the conclusion that examination is necessary，however，its method should be improved．

12．套语

1）It’s well known to us that ．．．

2）As is known to us．．．

3）This is a topic that is being widely talked about．

4）From the graph

（table，chart）listed above，it can be seen that ．．．

5）As a proverb says，“Where there is a will，there is a way．

例如：

As is well known to us，it is important for the students to know the world outside campus．

The reason for this is obvious．Nowadays,the society is changing and developing rapidly，and

the campus is no longer an“ivory tower.As college students，

we must get in touch with the world outside the campus．

Only in this way can we adapt ourselves to the society quickly after

we graduate.

Keeping a diary in English does a great deal of good to my English study. Keeping a diary can help you review all the English knowledge you have learned. For example， you must know the correct spelling of each word needed in the diary； you must use the phrases correctly and choose the suitable sentence patterns， meanwhile， it is also necessary to use you knowledge of grammar in a correct way.Keeping a diary can help you not only to console your knowledge of English， but to form the habit of thinking in English. Practice makes perfect. By and by， your English writing will be greatly improved.

[谈写英语日记的好处英文写作

学生写作时，如果仅局限在把内容交代清楚的水准上，只选用一些普通的、直截了当的词，或一律使用简单句平铺直叙，那么，这样写出来的文章就会像一碗白开水，呆板、单调，没有可读性。下面是小编整理的英语作文写作10大技巧，欢迎阅读。

1. 灵活改变句子开头

在通常情况下，英语句子的排列方式为“主语+谓语+宾语”，即主语位于句子开头。但若根据情况适当改变句子的开头方式，比如使用倒状语或以状语开头等，会使文章增强表现力。如：

(1) There stands an old temple at the top of the hill.

→ At the top of the hill there stands an old temple.

在小山顶上有一座古庙。

(2) You can do it well only in this way.

→ Only in this way can you do it well.

只有这样你才能把它做好。

(3) A young woman sat by the window.

→ By the window sat a young woman.

窗户边坐着一个年轻妇女。

2. 避免重复使用同一词语

为了使表达更生动，更富表现力，同学们在写作时应尽量避免重复使用同一词语来表示同一意思，尤其是一些老生常谈的词语。如有的同学一看到“喜欢”二字，就会立刻想起like，事实上，英语中表示类似意思的词和短语很多，如 love, enjoy, prefer, appreciate, be fond of, care for等。如：

I like reading while my brother likes watching television.

→ I like reading while my brother enjoys watching television.

我喜欢看书，而我的兄弟却喜欢看电视。

3. 合理使用省略句

合理恰当地使用省略句，不仅可以使文章精练、简洁，而且会使文章更具文采和可读性。如：

(1) He may be busy. If he’s busy, I’ll call later. If he is not busy, can I see him now?

→ He may be busy. If so, I’ll call later. If not, can I see him now?

他可能很忙，要是这样，我以后再来拜访。要是不忙，我现在可以见他吗?

(2) If the weather is fine, we’ll go. If it is not fine, we’ll not go.

→ If the weather is fine, we’ll go. If not, not.

如果天气好，我们就去;如果天气不好，我们就不去了。

(3) She could have applied for that job, but she didn’t do so.

→ She could have applied for that job, but she didn’t.

她本可申请这份工作的，但她没有。

4. 适当运用非谓语结构

非谓语结构通常被认为是一种高级结构，适当运用非谓语结构，会给人一种熟练驾驭语言的印象。如：

(1) When he heard the news, they all jumped for joy.

→ Hearing the news, they all jumped for joy.

听了这消息他们都高兴得跳了起来。

(2) As I didn’t know her address, I wasn’t able to get in touch with her.

→ Not knowing her address, I wasn’t able to get in touch with her.

由于不知道她的地址，我没法和她联系。

(3) As he was born into a peasant family, he had only two years of schooling.

→ Born into a peasant family, he had only two years of schooling.

他出生农民家庭，只上过两年学。

5. 结合使用长句与短句

在英语写作中，过多地使用长句或过多地使用短句都不好。正确的做法是，根据实际情况在文章中交替使用长句与短语，使文章显得错落有致，这样不仅使文章在形式上增加美感，而且使文章读起来铿锵有力。如：

At noon we had a picnic lunch in the sunshine. Then we had a short rest. Then we began to play happily. We sang and danced. Some told stories. Some played chess.

→ At noon we had a picnic lunch in the sunshine. After a short rest, we had great fun singing and dancing, telling jokes and playing chess.

中午我们晒着太阳吃野餐。休息一会儿后，我们唱的唱歌，跳的跳舞，还有的讲笑话、下棋，大家玩得很开心。

6. 适当使用短语代替单词

(1) He has decided to be a teacher when he grows up.

→ He has made up his mind to be a teacher when he grows up.

他已决定长大了当老师。

(2) He doesnt like music.

→ He doesnt care much for music.

他不大喜欢音乐。

(3) He told me that the question was now under discussion.

→ He told me that the question was now being discussed.

他告诉我问题现正正在讨论中。

7. 恰当套用某些固定表达

(1) He was very tired. He couldn’t walk any farther.

→ He was too tired to walk any farther.

他太累了，不能再往前走了。

(2) The film was very interesting. Both the teachers and the students liked it.

→ The film was so interesting that both the teachers and the students liked it.

这电影很有趣，学生和老师都很喜欢。

(3) Your son is old. He can look after himself now.

→ Your son is old enough to look after himself now.

你的儿子已经长大，可以自己照顾自己了。

8. 尽量使句子带点“洋味”

(1) Dont worry. Be bold and try it, and youll learn it soon.

→Dont worry. Just go for it, and youll get it soon.

别担心，大胆试一试，你很快就会学会的。

(2) Thank you for playing with us.

→Thank you for sharing the time with us.

谢谢你陪我玩。

9. 综合使用各类所谓的“高级”结构

(1) Now everyone knows the news. I think Jim must have let it out.

→ Now everyone knows the news. I think it must have been Jim who has let it out.

现在人人都知道这消息了，我想一定是吉姆把它泄露出去的。

(2) We had to stand there to catch the offender.

→ What we had to do was (to) stand there, trying to catch the offender.

我们所能做的只是站在那儿，设法抓住违章者。

(3) If her pronunciation is not better than her teacher’s, it is at least as good as her teacher’s.

→ Her pronunciation is as good as, if not better than, her teacher’s.

如果她的语音不比她的老师好的话，至少也不会比她老师的差。

10. 适当使用名言警句点缀

在写作时根据实际情况恰当地用上一两句名言警句来点缀文章，不仅使文章显得有深度、有智慧，而且会让文章在评分中上一个“得分档次”。如：

(1) As the proverb says, “Where there is a will, there is a way.” Though you fail this time, you needn’t lose heart. As long as you work hard and stick to your dream, you will succeed one day.

(2) There is a proverb goes like this “Life isn’t a bed of roses.” It is ture that it is likely for everyone to meet problems and difficulties in life.

(3) In the modern world, more and more people live alone, which is not so good for our life. It is better for us to make more friends and enjoy friendship. Just as a proverb says, “A near friend is better than a far-dwelling kinsman.”

说明文是阐述事物的特征、本质、性能、结构、用途或科学原理的一种文体。其说明的对象可以是具体的，如：自然环境，仪表设备等；也可以是抽象的，如概念定律等。以下是小编整理的初中英语说明文写作要点，欢迎阅读！

说明文的写作相对于论说文来说，有一定的套路可循，因此不是十分复杂。说明科技方面的内容常用定义法、比较对比法、分类法、因果法等；说明自然环境方面的内容常用时间次序法、分类法等。当然，随着对象的不同，具体应该采用的方法也会有所不同。

说明文的写作应该注意的事项有下面几点：

1.语言简明扼要，通俗易懂，避免夸张华丽的辞藻，要把真实的一面展现在读者面前。

2.说明时一定要把握一个中心主题。说明文中细枝末节较多，但不能喧宾夺主。

3.说明的次序非常重要。合理的次序会使文章条理清楚，脉络明晰。因此，练习时可以尝试不同的次序进行写作，找出最合理的一种。

4.由于说明文写实性较强，有时难免会让人感到没有生气。因此，可以适当使用一些比喻、拟人等修辞手段，来增加文章的色彩。

下面是一篇说明一所医院布局的文章。文章虽短，但需要说明的内容却达11处之多。平均一句话就要描写一处，如果组织得不好，便会给人凌乱的感觉。

为了避免这一点，文章把整个布局图分三部分来写：

贯彻医院的是main road，第一部分以大门为参照物，介绍了靠大门且通过main road东西相对的急诊楼和门诊楼。

第二部分以湖为参照物，中心线还是main road，介绍其他分诊楼、实验室、放射室等。

第三部分写main road尽头的建筑物。

这样，繁多的细节显得井井有条。因此，选择好主线及参照物是决定文章成功的关键。

Directions：For this part，you are allowed 30 minutes to write a composition about“THE LAYOUT OF A HOSPITAL”. Locate some important departments in the hospital based on the information given below.Your composition should be no less than 120 words.

（1）the Emergency Department

（2）the Out-patient Department

（3）the Surgery Department

（4）the Dispensary

（5）the Physician Department

（6）the Eye，Ear，and Throat Department

（7）the Dental Department

（8）the Laboratory

（9）the X-ray Department

（10）the Administrative Building

（11）the Ward

例文：

The Layout of a Hospital Near the gate，on the westside of the road is the Emergency Department. Opposite the Emergency Department across the Main Road is the Out-patient Department. The building to the southwest of the lake is the Dispensary，which face the Surgery Department lying on the other side of the road.Along the west wall，from south to north，stand three buildings：the Physician Department，the Eye，Ear，and Throat Department，and the Dental Department.

The Laboratory is to the northwest of the round about，and beside the Laboratory，the X-ray Department is located on the same side of the road. A winding road by the lake leads to the Ward.

Near the end of the Main Road，the Administrative Building is situated on the east side.The hospital is nicely and conveniently laid out.

1、True mastery of any skill takes a lifetime.

对任何技能的掌握都需要一生的刻苦操练。

2、Sweat is the lubricant of success.

汗水是成功的润滑剂。

3、If you are doing your best,you will not have to worry about failure.

如果你竭尽全力，你就不用担心失败。

4、Energy and persistence conquer all things.

能量和坚持可以征服一切事情。

5、Bravery never goes out of fashion.

勇敢永远不过时!

6、Those who turn back never reach the summit.

回头的人永远到不了最高峰!

7、Proper preparation solves 80 percent of lifes problems.

适当的准备能解决生活中80%的问题。

8、Winners do what losers dont want to do.

胜利者做失败者不愿意做的事!

9、Every noble work is at first impossible.

每一个伟大的工程最初看起来都是不可能做到的!

10、We improve ourselves by victories over ourselves. There must be contests, and we must win.

我们通过战胜自己来改进自我。 那里一定有竞赛，我们一定要赢!

11、Speech is the image of actions.

语言是行动的反映。

12、It is always morning somewhere in the world.

世界上总是有某个地方可以看到阳光。

13、If you do not learn to think when you are young, you may never learn. ( Edison )

如果你年轻时不学会思考，那就永远不会。(爱迪生)

14、Anger begins with folly, and ends in repentance.

愤怒以愚蠢开始，以后悔告终。

15、Talents come from diligence, and knowledge is gained by accumulation.

天才在于勤奋，知识在于积累。

16、The greater the man, the more restrained his anger.

人越伟大，越能克制怒火。

17、If there were less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world. ( O. Wilde )

如果世界上少一些同情，世界上也就会少一些麻烦。(王尔德)

18、All lay load on the willing horse.

人善被人欺，马善被人骑。

19、Strike the iron while it is hot.

趁热打铁。

20、When shepherds quarrel, the wolf has a winning game.

鹬蚌相争，渔翁得利。

1.According to a recent survey, four million people die each year from diseases linked to smoking. 依照最近的一项调查，每年有4，000，000人死于与吸烟有关的疾病。

2. The latest surveys show that quite a few children have unpleasant associations with homework.最近的调查显示相当多的孩子对家庭作业没什么好感。

3. No invention has received more praise and abuse than Internet. 没有一项发明像互联网一样同时受到如此多的赞扬和批评。

4. Many experts point out that physical exercise contributes directly to a person’s physical fitness.

许多专家指出体育锻炼直接有助于身体健康。

5.写信的开头：Very glad to receive your letter of July 13.

6.One day after school,XiaoMing passed a Café on his way home.

7.The boss had no choice but to let him in.

8.How he enjoyed himself on the computer!

9.Walking home full of fear,he was sure that he would be scolded.

10.However,other students are against the idea.

11.Sometimes we have too many examinations which are too difficult for us.

12.today’s activity has taught us the new meaning of the spirit of LeiFeng:sharing with others what you have—you time,energy,or knowledge—makes you fell warm in you heart.It has truly a difference in how I feel about myself.

13.The girl whose composition was well written is spoken highly of.

14.No matter what he says，I won’t believe.

15. Thanks to the good weather，our journey was comfortable.

16. At the news of his death，she went pale with sorrow.

1 人活着 总是要得罪一些人的 就要看那些人是否值得得罪

When alive ,we may probably offend some people.However, we must think about whether they are deserved offended。

2 命里有时终需有 命里无时莫强求

You will have it if it belongs to you,whereas you dont kveth for it if it doesnt appear in your life。

3 没有谁对不起谁，只有谁不懂得珍惜谁。

No one indebted for others,while many people dont know how to cherish others。

4 永远不是一种距离，而是一种决定。

Eternity is not a distance but a decision。

5 在回忆里继续梦幻不如在地狱里等待天堂

Dreaming in the memory is not as good as waiting for the paradise in the hell。

6 哪里有真爱存在，哪里就有奇迹

Where there is great love, there are always miracles。

7 爱情就像一只蝴蝶，它喜欢飞到哪里，就把欢乐带到哪里。

Love is like a butterfly. It goes where it pleases and it pleases where it goes。

8 假如每次想起你我都会得到一朵鲜花，那么我将永远在花丛中徜徉。

If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden。

9 有了你，我迷失了自我;失去你，我多么希望自己再度迷失。

Within you I lose myself, without you I find myself wanting to be lost again。

10 每一个沐浴在爱河中的人都是诗人

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet。

11 看看我的眼睛，你会发现你对我而言意味着什么。

Look into my eyes you will see what you mean to me。

12 距离使两颗心靠得更近。

Distance makes the hearts grow fonder。

13 如果没有相等的爱，那就让我爱多一些吧。

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me。

14 爱是长在我们心里的藤蔓。

Love is a vine that grows into our hearts。

15 因为你，我懂得了爱。

If I know what love is, it is because of you。

16 爱情是生活最好的提神剂。

Love is the greatest refreshment in life。

17 有了你，黑暗不再是黑暗。

The darkness is no darkness with thee。

18 如果没有人爱我们，我们也就不会再爱自己了。

We cease loving ourselves if no one loves us。

18 治疗爱的创伤唯有加倍地去爱。

There is no remedy for love but to love more。

20 如果爱不疯狂就不是爱了。

When love is not madness, it is not love。

21 有爱的心永远年轻。

A heart that loves is always young。

22 爱情就像月亮，不增则减。

Love is like the moon, when it does not increase, it decreases。

23 灵魂不能没有爱而存在。

The soul cannot live without love。

24 生命虽短，爱却绵长。

Brief is life, but love is long。

25 爱比大衣更能驱走寒冷。

Love keeps the cold out better than a cloak。

26 没有了爱，地球便成了坟墓。

Take away love, and our earth is a tomb。

27 我的爱与你同在。

My heart is with you。

28 尽管还不曾离开，我已对你朝思暮想!

I miss you so much already and I havent even left yet!

29 我会想你，在漫漫长路的每一步。

Ill think of you every step of the way。

30 无论你身在何处，无论你为何忙碌，我都会在此守候

Wherever you go, whatever you do, I will be right here waiting for you。

一、优化词汇输入教学，丰富词汇知识积累

词汇是一篇文章最基本的组 成要素。头脑中如果没有一定数量的、且处于鲜活状态的词汇，就无法写出好文章。要写出好的文章，就必须善于从众多的词语中选择和运用最恰当的词语。因此， 加强词汇教学、扩大和丰富学生的词汇量是提高学生写作能力的基础工作。克拉申的“语言输入假说模式”认为：正确和恰当的语言输入将会使语言学习的效果更 佳。

最佳语言输入的两个必要条件：

1)密切相关的

2)大量的。因此，将密切相关的常用词汇、习惯搭配适当集中教学，反复归纳、不断循环和强化是较好的词 汇输入方法，同时也保证了常用词汇在头脑中的鲜活状态，为写作输出提供可靠保障。

二、加强基础写作训练，活化基础知识积累

在学生写作过程中，我们 常常会发现许多学生的词汇量与运用能力不成正比的现象，写作中经常出现词汇贫乏和用词不当等问题。这种问题的出现实际上是学生获得的知识没有有效的活化。 配合词汇和句型教学，教师可以经常以所教学词汇为关键词拟定一些与时事或生活相关的话题，让学生用词、句做翻译练习，一段时间(4-5天)之后，再让学生 用这些词、句进行写作，多写多练以达到活化知识的目的。

三、广泛阅读，拓展知识积累

“熟读唐诗三百首，不会作 诗也会吟”。在大量的阅读过程中，可使学生开拓视野，拓展知识，增加语感，为写作提供必要的语言材料。写作和阅读是互相促进、相辅相成的。有些词汇和句 型，学生只是似曾相识，通过广泛的阅读能促使学生把这些东西运用得更熟练，表达得更准确。反过来，这也会有效地提高学生的阅读理解能力。

英语写作的开头结尾是写作的重点。下面语文迷为大家带来了经典的句型，供大家阅读参考。

一.开头句型

1.As far as ...is concerned 就……而言

2.It goes without saying that... 不言而喻，...

3.It can be said with certainty that... 可以肯定地说......

4.As the proverb says， 正如谚语所说的，

5.It has to be noticed that... 它必须注意到，...

6.Its generally recognized that... 它普遍认为...

7.Its likely that ... 这可能是因为...

8.Its hardly that... 这是很难的......

9.Its hardly too much to say that... 它几乎没有太多的说…

10.What calls for special attention is that...需要特别注意的是

11.Theres no denying the fact that...毫无疑问，无可否认

12.Nothing is more important than the fact that... 没有什么比这更重要的是…

13.whats far more important is that... 更重要的是…

二.衔接句型

1.A case in point is ... 一个典型的例子是...

2.As is often the case...由于通常情况下...

3.As stated in the previous paragraph 如前段所述

4.But the problem is not so simple. Therefore 然而问题并非如此简单，所以……

5.But its a pity that... 但遗憾的是…

6.For all that...对于这一切...... In spite of the fact that...尽管事实......

7.Further, we hold opinion that... 此外，我们坚持认为，...

8.However , the difficulty lies in...然而，困难在于…

9.Similarly, we should pay attention to... 同样，我们要注意...

10.not(that)...but(that)...不是，而是

11.In view of the present station.鉴于目前形势

12.As has been mentioned above...正如上面所提到的…

13.In this respect, we may as well (say) 从这个角度上我们可以说

14.However, we have to look at the other side of the coin, that is... 然而我们还得看到事物的另一方面，即 …

三.结尾句型

1.I will conclude by saying... 最后我要说…

2.Therefore, we have the reason to believe that...因此，我们有理由相信…

3.All things considered,总而言之 It may be safely said that...它可以有把握地说......

4.Therefore, in my opinion, its more advisable...因此，在我看来，更可取的是…

5.From what has been discussed above, we may safely draw the conclusion that….通过以上讨论，我们可以得出结论…

6.The data/statistics/figures lead us to the conclusion that….通过数据我们得到的结论是，....

7.It can be concluded from the discussion that...从中我们可以得出这样的结论

8.From my point of view, it would be better if...在我看来……也许更好

写作练习：旅游活动（中段考范文）

【单元财富运用】

假定你是李华，上周末和家人开车去大角湾度假。请你根据以下要点，给你的美国朋友Tom介绍你的旅游经历。

1. 出发时间：周六早上7点；

2. 准备物品：零食、衣服、相机等；

3. 旅游活动：游泳，欣赏海水、海滩、日出和日落等美景，吃海鲜，买纪念品；

4. 你的感受。

【注意】：1. 词数100；

2. 开头已给出，但不计入总词数；

3. 可以适当增加节，以使行文连贯。

Last weekend my family and I went to Dajiaowan Gulf for a holiday.______________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________

步骤1：认真审题，提炼要点。

一定体裁：记叙文，记叙一次旅游活动

二定时态：旅游发生在过去，因此描述旅游前的准备和过程都应该采用一般过去

时；而感想则可以用一般现在时或现在完成时。

三定要点：结合写作内容，整理和罗列要点。

表达旅游活动的常用词汇：

步骤2：整合信息，连词成句。

1. 星期六早上7点开车出发。

_____________________________________________________________________

2. 准备好零食、衣服、相机等。

__________________________________________________________________

3. 在海滩游泳，欣赏海水日出和日落等美景。

__________________________________________________________________

4. 吃海鲜，买纪念品；

___________________________________________________________________

5. 谈感受。

___________________________________________________________________

步骤3：连句成段，用上适当的关联词。

not only…but also…, where, what’s more /besides / in addition, then, because…..

【我的作文】

Last weekend my family and I went to Dajiaowan Gulf for a holiday.______________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

中考英语作文评分标准一般分为三类：一等作文、二等作文和三等作文。为了让不同层次的学生在作文得分率上都能有所提高，现对各类作文进行分析，找出相应的得分秘诀。下面说说中考英语一等作文的写作方法。

一、中考英语一等作文的评分标准

内容完整，具体，丰富，包含所有要点，能够围绕内容适当发挥，语句流畅，应用了较丰富的语言结构和词汇，用词准确，句子通顺，行文连续，层次分明，表达清楚，无语法错误，书写规范，标点正确，计满分。

二、中考英语一等作文的写作要求

(一)确保作文的完整性，关注评卷第一印象

考试的时候，要尽量留出充足的时间写作文。这样，我们才能有足够的时间去构思，打草稿。由于评卷是人工进行的，所以作文留给人的第一印象是很重要的，从以往经验看，第一印象至少占1分，那些卷面整洁，文字自然流畅，书写工整，标点符号正确的非常“吃香”，所以，大家平时就应该注意作文的“形象”，“仪表”一定要保证自己看卷面时觉得舒服，那么中考得高分就不是一句空话了。

不论做哪种题目，审题是最关键的，写好中考作文更是这样!要做到内容完整，我们首先要认真看好题目的要求，分析题目到底要我们写什么。比如要求我们用第三人称来写作，如果审题没有审好，用了第一人称，那么，作文一定得不到满分，说不定还是最差的。所以，要重视审题，按题目的具体要求进行构思。中考书面表达基本上都是提示性作文(包括看图作文)，因此要保证运用所有的提示要点，进行合理的发挥，为写下满分作文打好基础。

(二)打好草稿质量，全面留意扣主题

写好中考英语一等作文除了做到上面讲的内容之外，还要做到以下几点：

1. 要做到内容具体。中考提示性作文都有具体的内容和要求，写作时只要按规定将作文写出来，得分就不难，但是要想得满分，必须做到围绕内容适当发挥，并且要突出文章的主题，体现实际的中心思想。

2. 要做到语句流畅。这就要求有扎实的英语基本功。在平时的学习过程中，注意一些常用句式的表达方法。要尽量使用自己最熟悉的词语和句型，要尽量避免汉语式的表达方式。要注意句子之间的连贯性，不仅仅从语法上，更主要的是从句意上，把握句子的连贯性。

3. 要做到层次分明。写文章不都是一个段落，一个模式，要根据文章的具体需要，来确定文章究竟用几个段落，作文要讲究层次分明，突出主题。

4. 要按规定的词数书写。中考提示作文都有具体的词数要求，写作时要注意数一数所用的单词数量，词数过多或过少都会丢分。

5. 最后要注意检查。写完作文不是没事可做，最后一步就是细心检查，这很关键。检查时要从题目要求开始，到具体内容无误结束。保证词语，句型的运用正确，标点运用得当等等，都是重点检查的项目，直到在一定的时间之内完成好作文，不留遗憾为止。

英语写作是语言综合运用能力的具体体现，也是很多高中学生学习中的弱项。如何提高自己的英语写作能力呢?

一、提高英语写作能力的原则

(一)渐进性原则。要坚持“句—段—篇”的训练程序，由易到难，循序渐进。在英语写作的初始阶段，要始终注意培养学生良好的写作习惯，狠抓基本功训练。在学生掌握了基本句型并能写出简单句子后，再要求学生根据一些体例写出小段的文章。在段落写作中要引导学生分析段落的结构、段落的中心句、句与句之间的逻辑关系、写作手法等，这样有利于下一步一篇文章的写作。在文章写作中要教会学生如何构思文章、如何运用正确的写作技巧等。

(二)多样性原则。要坚持训练形式的多样化及写作文体的多样性。从形式上而言，可以用回答提问的口头作文，也可以用续写故事;可以改写课文，也可以仿写课文;可以写提纲训练谋篇布局，也可以写拓展段训练发散思维……。从文体上而言，可以写说明文、议论文、记叙文，也可以写书信、便条、通知等实用文体。

(三)结合性原则。要坚持听说读训练和写训练相结合。根据语言习得理论，学习者在学习时常先通过听和读吸取语言知识，从而了解别人的思想，再通过说和写来表达自己的思想，让别人了解自己。大量的听说训练能促进读写能力的提高。因此，写与听说读紧密结合，进行多元化的能力训练，可使学生的各项能力互相影响、互相渗透、互相促进。

(四)控制性原则。要坚持写作前的指导，控制学生的汉语语言思维，发展英语语言思维。语言学习在很大程度上主要是模仿，而非随心所欲地自由表达。教师要加强写作前的指导，可给出范文让学生模仿，以熟悉其语篇结构。同时要控制其汉语语言思维，尽可能让学生习惯英语语言思维，以便于学生学习和掌握地道、正确的英语。

(五)持久性原则。要坚持长期、正确的写作训练。英语写作能力的提高并非一朝一夕之事，而是一个长期的、艰巨的、渐进的过程。这就要求教师、学生都要有充分的思想准备，要有坚韧不拔的意志和必胜的信心。

二、提高英语写作能力的方法。

(一)通过积累词汇量，提高英语写作能力。犹如土木砖石是建筑的材料一样，词汇是说话写作的必需材料，也是制约写作能力提高的瓶颈。可以想象，如果要写一个句子，10个单词有8个单词拼写错误或拼写不出，有2 个单词用法不当，又怎么能清楚地表达自己的思想呢?因此，在平时的教学中要强调学生记忆单词，记住单词的拼读、用法、意思等。记忆单词的方法有很多，各人有各人的记忆方法和习惯，可因人而异。教师可通过要求学生朗读单词、听写单词、默写单词、遣词造句、词汇竞赛等多种方法促进学生记单词。记忆单词是一个长期的反复的过程，要长期地坚持下去，才能不断积累大量的词汇，为英语写作打下坚实的基础。

(二)通过扩大阅读量，提高英语写作能力。古人云“熟读唐诗三百首，不会作诗也会吟”，这是汉语的一种学习方法，同样可借鉴于英语写作。多阅读是学生增加接触英语语言材料、接受信息、活跃思维、增长智力的一种途径，同时也是培养学生英语思维能力、提高理解力、增强语感、巩固和扩大词汇量的一种好方法，有利于促进英语写作能力的提高。在阅读训练中，教师要注意以下问题：一是指导阅读方法，分析文章结构、中心思想、段落中心句、写作方法等，帮助学生掌握各类文章的结构及写作方法。二要精读与泛读相结合，通过推敲优秀的文章来学会写作方法和选词用词;通过大量的泛读来吸取信息量，扩大词汇量。三要扩大阅读量。提供阅读的材料涉及面要广，才能不断扩大学生的知识面，使学生适应各种题材的写作。

(三)通过提高听说能力，提高英语写作能力。英语听说读写四种能力是相互影响、相互促进的，提高听说能力必定会促进写作能力的提高。要提高听说能力关键在于创设一个良好的英语环境。教师要尽可能地用英语授课，多开展专门的听说训练，同时开展丰富多彩的课外英语活动，让学生沉浸在英语海洋中去领略、去体会、去使用英语，久而久之，学生自然能使用正确的、地道的英语进行交谈与写作。

(四)通过重视写作过程，提高英语写作能力。长期以来，英语写作成果教学法(THE PRODUCT APPROACH)在我国居于主导地位，教师根据写作的终成品来判断写作的成败，重视写作的技术性细节(如格式、拼写、语法等)，忽视写作过程的指导。

英语作文如何才能得高分呢?以下几种手段是增加句子复杂性的常见方法,也是得高分的“亮点”。

1. 改变句子的开头方式,不是一味地都是主语开头,接着是谓语、宾语,最后再加一个状语。可以把状语置于句首,或用分词作状语等。试比较:

(原文) My brother and I went to the cinema by bicycle the other day.

(修正) The other day my brother and I went to the cinema by bicycle.

(原文) The young man couldn’t help crying when he heard the bad news.

(修正) Hearing the bad news, the young man couldn’t help crying.

2. 在整篇文章中,避免只使用一两个句式,要灵活运用诸如强调句、主从复合句、分词短语、倒装句、省略句等。例如:

(1)强调句

(原文) The dog has saved my little sister bravely.

(修正) It is the dog that has saved my little sister bravely.

(2)主从复合句

(原文) We had to stand there to catch the offender.

(修正) What we had to do was to stand there, trying to catch the offender.

(3)分词短语、由with或without引导的短语

(原文) The driver escaped and didn’t stop, he left the old man lying on the road.

(修正) The driver escaped without stopping, leaving the old man lying on the road.

(4)倒装句

(原文) I went to bed at 11:30.

(修正) Not until 11:30 did I go to bed.

(5)省略句

(原文) While you are crossing the street, you should be careful.

(修正) While crossing the street, you should be careful.

3. 通过分句和合句,增强句子的连贯性和表现力。例如:

(原文) He stopped us an hour ago. He made us catch the next offender.

(修正) He stopped us half an hour ago and made us catch the next offender.

(原文) We had a short rest. Then we began to play happily. We sang and danced.

(修正) After a short rest, we had great fun singing and dancing.

4. 注意连接词与句子的运用。

以2001年高考作文为例,在信的开头,可加上“You want to know something about what is going on in schools in China?”这句话起承上启下的作用,使文章过渡自然;再如,用“What was worse?”引出减负前,晚上还要做作业,就寝时间11:30等要点。又如,“Now I have more free time...” 可引出减负后的情况。另外,在信的结尾,可用“How about you? I’m looking forward to hearing from you.”来自然地结束这封信。

5. 使用过渡词语。

写好了每个句子,并不一定就是一篇好文章,因为作为一篇文章,还必须行文连贯。那么,如何使文章行文连贯呢?这就要求我们在组成篇章时,要用好过渡性词语,过渡性词语就像是我们组装机械时使用的润滑剂一样,起着润滑的作用。常用的过渡词语主要有:

并列递进:and, also, as well as, besides, what’s more, furthermore, moreover, etc.

转折:but, yet, however, although, nevertheless, in spite of, after all, etc.

因果:because, as, for, since, for this reason, because of, so, therefore, thus, as a result, etc.

对比:or, otherwise, like, unlike, on the contrary, while, on the other hand, instead of, etc.

总结:in all, in brief, on the whole, in short, in general, in one word, etc.

总之,要使文章的层次高,可读性强,考生应增加些较高级的词汇与复杂的结构,并运用恰当的连接词和复合句,只有这样,才能在考试中取得理想的成绩。

一、基础写作训练的方法

1.利用课文的词、句复习，训练学生的组句能力。从词和句入手，将每个单元课文的词和句与基础写作结合起来，是培养和提高学生的英语能力的有效途径。这不仅能帮助提高学生记忆和灵活应用词汇的能力，而且还有助于训练学生语句表达的正确性。

(1)归纳词汇和句型，帮助学生建立对词、句使用的感性认识。写作是一种语言的输出形式，只有大量的语言输入，语言输出才有可能;只有积累了一定的感受和大量的语言素材，写作才有可能进行。为了帮助学生记忆课文中的单词和短语，达到积累语言素材，掌握基本语法知识与语句结构的目的，教师可以从训练学生归纳每个单元课文中出现的重要词汇、短语和常用句型入手，使学生对句型结构的认识更加清楚，并对词、句的使用语境形成感性的认识。

(2)操练词汇和句型，训练学生的记忆和使用词、句的能力。为了使学生掌握和应用课文中所学词汇和句型，教师应为学生创设多层次的练习活动，拓宽写作的训练途径。教师可采用将学生从课文中归纳的词汇、句型进行词类转换、习惯用法、句型转换、完型填空、写短文等形式的训练，帮助提高学生的记忆和使用词、句的能力。

二、借鉴课文词、句进行仿写。

通过提供情景让学生模仿造句，不仅可以降低写作难度，而且可以增加学生写作的兴趣、自信和成就感，使学生的遣词造句的能力在实践中得到提升。

三、借鉴课文句型，训练写作多种表达与技巧，拓展学生思维。

教师在教学实践中会发现，学生在基础写作中往往出现句式雷同、语句呆板、行文单一等现象，缺乏用5个句子有效表达和传输信息的能力。因此，教师就有必要继续进一步加强句子多样化表达、句子转换替代、句子合并等训练，教会学生使用不同的短语、句型结构表达同一的意义;同时，还让学生明白写作的逻辑原则:一个句子表达的信息量越多，而且使用的句子越精练、清楚，那么句意表达和传输信息就越有效。

四、利用课文体裁，训练学生谋篇布局的能力。

教师会发现高三学生在写作中存在的另一个问题是层次不清、结构散乱以及逻辑性不强，这是因为学生缺乏谋篇布局的能力。针对这方面问题，教师可以在教学中利用课文的体裁进行文章结构方面的训练以及进行句子、段落间的连接训练。

写作词汇提升是把“阅读词汇”转化为“写作词汇”的过程。举个例子，当我在课堂上问及大家“害怕”这个词英文表达的时候，很多同学不加思维的就告诉我是“afraid”，我再问大家这个词是什么时候学的时候，很多人恍然大悟，原来词汇早在初中甚至是小学的时候就学过了。那么，考研阅卷的老师如何以“afraid”这个词判断你到底是一个合格的大学毕业生还是一个仅仅上过初中的同学呢，现在我们就不难理解为什么考研写作的平均分只有满分的一半了。

当我们翻开大学的英语课本我们会发现，在大学的四年中(甚至只是大一大二的两年中)我们就学过很多表示“害怕”但却比“afraid”要高级的多的词汇，比如：horror，scared，astonished 等等。这当中的任何一个词都会比afraid得的分数要高，这就是所谓的高级词汇取代低级词汇的过程。

现在，我们就要树立一个思想，写作的最小组成单位是词汇，词汇有低级的(baby words)也有高级的(advanced words)，想要得到考研写作高分的第一步就是要有意识的在写作中用高级词汇去取代相对低级的词汇，从而反映出自己的词汇表现能力(lexical resource)。

英语写作技巧二、句型 —— 学会自创简单句

考研写作最基本的句式称之为“自创句”。“自创句”是根据所要表达的含义完全自主创作的英文句子，其基础是语法知识。阅读时不理解某些语法现象仍然能理解文章，而写作要求精确，是和语法联系最为紧密的语言功能。其中，简单句是一切句子的基础，简单句的创作可三步走：

1. 根据句义确定唯一的谓语动词。

2. 根据动词种类(无宾、单宾、双宾、宾补或系动词)补全句子成分，如主语、宾语、宾语补足语和表语等。

3. 注意谓语动词和主语在人称和数上的一致。

英语写作技巧三、构思 —— 学习英文独特的思想表达方式

当我们有了高级的词汇和复杂的句型之后，是不是就一定能写出高分的作文了呢?不一定。写作是一个人思维的理性表达，因此，对于写作来说，思维方式的优劣更是一篇文章好与坏的根本性的指向标。

英文有自己独特的思想表达模式，要学会用英文的表达模式写作。所以建议大家在夯实词汇、句型之后多读多背多写，练习地道的英文写作思维方式。阅读和背诵是积累语言素材的关键，《新概念》序言中甚至提到“只写读过的语言”。在此基础之上，“纸上得来终觉浅，绝知此事要躬行”，阅读背诵素材之后，写作提高需要大量的实战演习

对比观点题型

（1） 要求论述两个对立的观点并给出自己的看法。

1． 有一些人认为......

2． 另一些人认为......

3． 我的看法

The topic of

①-----------------（主题）is becoming more and more popular recently. There are two sides of opinions about it. Some people say A is their favorite. They hold their view for the reason of

②-----------------（支持A的理由一）What is more,

③-------------理由二). Moreover,

④---------------(理由三).

While others think that B is a better choice in the following three reasons. Firstly,-----------------(支持B的理由一). Secondly (besides),

⑥------------------（理由二）. Thirdly (finally),

⑦------------------(理由三).

From my point of view, I think

⑧----------------（我的观点）. The reason is that

⑨--------------------(原因). As a matter of fact, there are some other reasons to explain my choice. For me, the former is surely a wise choice .

（2） 给出一个观点，要求考生反对这一观点

Some people believe that

①----------------（观点一）. For example, they think

②-----------------（举例说明）．And it will bring them

③-----------------(为他们带来的好处).

In my opinion, I never think this reason can be the point. For one thing,

④-------------(我不同意该看法的理由一). For another thing,

⑤-----------------(反对的理由之二)．

Form all what I have said, I agree to the thought that

⑥------------------(我对文章所讨论主题的看法)．

阐述主题题型

要求从一句话或一个主题出发，按照提纲的要求进行论述．

１． 阐述名言或主题所蕴涵的意义．

２． 分析并举例使其更充实．

The good old proverb ----------------（名言或谚语）reminds us that ----------------(释义). Indeed, we can learn many things form it.

First of all,-----------------(理由一). For example, -------------------(举例说明). Secondly,----------------(理由二). Another case is that ---------------(举例说明). Furthermore , ------------------(理由三)．

In my opinion, ----------------(我的观点). In short, whatever you do, please remember the say------A. If you understand it and apply it to your study or work, you”ll necessarily benefit a lot from it.

1、紧扣主题，短文必须包括提纲中的全部要点;与主题无关或关系不大的字句必须一律删去。

2、文章通顺，前后贯通，语言流畅。

3、句子开头多样化，句型多样化。

4、无句型结构错误，无语法错误和用语造句等方面的错误。

5、短文字数不得少于150个字。

对考研英语短文的策略：

1.分配好短文各部分篇幅比例

根据在40分钟内写150词的《大纲》要求，合理分配各部分篇幅比例显得非常重要。篇幅比例安排大致如下：

(1)开头：可控制在4句话之内，以2——3句较为适宜。该部分约占全文篇幅的10%——15%。

(2)主体：约占全篇短文的70%——80%。

(3)结尾：这部分应控制在2——3句话之内，约占全文篇幅10——15%。

2.合理分配时间

应该切记短文写作时间仅为40分钟，在这较短的时间内考生需完成120——150词的短文。这就要求考生做到有条不紊、忙而不乱，充分发挥自己应有的水平。从而稳操胜券，驾轻就熟，从容应对。建议考生在动笔之前，用5分钟的时间写个提纲理清思路，然后再动笔。此外，要留出5——6分钟来修改抄写。以避免不必要的笔误，给评卷老师留下良好的印象。

3.审题——紧扣主题的关键

所谓审题，就是正确理解题意，所写短文要紧扣题目要求。从每年的英文短文考题可看出，除了题目外，还有开头第一句话和一个写作提纲。这个写作提纲就是短文的写作具体范围。考生必须以指定的句子开头，按写作提纲规定的要点和顺序(通常是3个要点)往下写。

通常3个要点就是写三段话，每段开头(除第一段已给了外)第一句话必须把该段写作提纲中的主要的词或主要意思包括进去，这就是段落中心句。每段其他句子必须紧扣该段的段落中心句，与段落中心句无关的句子或关系不大的句子必须坚决删去。由于写作提纲中所给的3个要点(即关键词)已包括在每段开头的段落中心句(即每段开头的第一句)中，而每段的其他句子又紧扣段落中心句，这就使每段的内容紧扣主题，而不至离开主题去谈别的问题，这就是抓住主题的关键。

well-known 众所周知 important 重要的 pollution 污染

focus 面对 benefit 益处 development 发展

society 社会 knowledge 知识 necessary 必要的

opinion 观点 harm 危害 exception 例外

advantage 优点 disadvantage 缺点 serious严峻的

measures 措施 solve 解决 overcome 克服

increase 增加 decrease减少 deny 否认

prefer 喜欢 example 例子 addicted 沉迷

useful 有用的

play an important role in our life在生活中扮演重要角色

with the development of our society 随着社会的发展

bring a lot of benefits 带来很多益处

everything has two sides 任何事物都具有两面性

Become more and more serious 变得越来越严峻

on the contrary 相反 take measures 采取措施

solve this problem 解决这个问题

the best way to 最好的方法

overcome the difficulties 克服困难

be faced with 面对

No one can deny the fact that 没有人能够否认这个事实。。。

in favour of 赞同 支持 For example 例如

become addicted to the Internet 沉迷于网络 All in all 总之

come to the conclusion 得出结论

As far as I am concerned that 就我而言

There is no doubt that 毫无疑问

in a right way 正确的方法

waste a lot of time 浪费时间

1.爱屋及乌 Love me, love my dog.

2.百闻不如一见 Seeing is believing.

3.比上不足比下有余 worse off than some, better off than many; to fall short of the best, but be better than the worst.

4.笨鸟先飞 A slow sparrow make an early start.

5.不眠之夜 whe night

6.不以物喜不以己悲 not pleased by external gains, not saddened by personnal losses

7.不遗余力 spare no effort; go all out; do ones best

8.不打不成交 No discord, no concord.

9.拆东墙补西墙 rob Peter to pay Paul

10.辞旧迎新 bid farewell to the old and usher in the new; ring out the old year and ring in the new

11.大事化小小事化了 try first to make their mistake sound less serious and then to reduce it to nothing at all

12.大开眼界 open ones eyes; broaden ones horizon; be an eye-opener

13.国泰民安 The country flourishes and people live in peace

14.过犹不及 going too far is as bad as not going far enough; beyond is as wrong as falling short; too much is as bad as too little

15.功夫不负有心人 Everything comes to him who waits.

16.好了伤疤忘了疼 once on shore, one prays no more

17.好事不出门恶事传千里 Good news never goes beyond the gate, while bad news spread far and wide.

18.和气生财 Harmony brings wealth.

19.活到老学到老 One is never too old to learn.

20.既往不咎 let bygones be bygones

21.金无足赤人无完人 Gold cant be pure and man cant be perfect.

22.金玉满堂 Treasures fill the home.

23.脚踏实地 be down-to-earth

24.脚踩两只船 sit on the fence

25.君子之交淡如水 the friendship between gentlemen is as pure as crystal; a hedge between keeps friendship green

26.老生常谈陈词滥调 cut and dried, cliché

27.礼尚往来 Courtesy calls for reciprocity.

28.留得青山在不怕没柴烧 Where there is life, there is hope.

29.马到成功 achieve immediate victory; win instant success

30.名利双收 gain in both fame and wealth

31.茅塞顿开 be suddenly enlightened

32.没有规矩不成方圆 Nothing can be accomplished without norms or standards. 33.每逢佳节倍思亲 On festive occasions more than ever one thinks of ones dear ones far away.It is on the festival occasions when one misses his dear most.

34.谋事在人成事在天 The planning lies with man, the outcome with Heaven. Man proposes, God disposes.

35.弄巧成拙 be too smart by half; Cunning outwits itself

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