Analysis Of The Devil - 1376 Words

The Devil Is in the Details Writing an essay is like constructing a building. They are similar from their overall strong and beautiful structures to their small units like bricks to the building and words to the essay. Grammar glues all the words together in nice order to make sentences, which are put in the structure to make a good essay. Like many other students who are not native speakers, I do not have a strong English foundation, but I am still able to make a great structure for my essays. However, much like people do not feel comfortable living in houses that look good on the outside but have holes in the walls, ugly light fixtures, and other terrible details on the inside, people do not like to read essays that have strong†¦show more content†¦That means basically almost every word I speak or write involves tenses. For Americans, tense to their language is like breathing to our body. Something that is crucially important but we do not really pay attention to it since we are doing it way too ofte n. By contrast, as a Chinese, whose language has nothing to do with tenses, I have to say I have struggled with tenses a lot. What has made me struggle the most in this essay is the special uses of the present tense. Rules for Writers explains that we should â€Å"Use the present tense when expressing general truths, when writing about literature, and when quoting, summarizing, or paraphrasing an author s views.† (245). It sounds pretty easy, but I did get confused when I was writing the essay. In the essay, I spoke in general about the relationship between a father and a son. Since I wanted to write about the boy in his different ages, I felt so weird to use the present tense. At that point, it just did not make sense to me if I used the present tense to describe both his childhood and adulthood. So, here is a sentence I wrote, â€Å"But soon the boy went into his adolescence, and slowly realized that there are many things his dad did not know, and actually he was kind of o utdated.† Now let us take a closer look to what Rules for Writers says about tenses. Tenses is only involved in the relation between when I am writing an event and when that event take place, which means it does not