I think that the video was very interesting and made some very good points. Being brought up in American culture and only having experience with academic writing of a high level in the US, one may never notice that there are other ways of doing things. The video does a great job of exposing many cultural issues that I would bet most haven't thought about.

Writing Across Borders

I found the video very interesting for a number of reasons. I work as a writing and pronunciation tutor at the English Language Institute on campus, so many of the issues raised and discussed in the video were not new to me. However, many feelings, intuitions, and experiences of mine were explicity and clearly enunciated in the video. I think this will prove useful as I attempt to help international students adjust to the U.S. academic writing style. Along the same lines, I found it very enlightening to hear more directly about the experiences of international students in the classroom. My interaction with students is oftentimes limited to discussion of an essay's grammar and organization. Hearing the tangible struggles of international students will, I believe, prove useful in providing the help and input on essays that international students are looking for when they come to me.

Writing Across Borders

This video was very interesting for me because I am also an international student and English is my second language. Actually, most of the stuff that covered in the video was same as my own experience. The most difficult thing to write English essay is the difference of structure of essay. English essay states the thesis statement first and explain the idea after, but Japanese essay discribes the idea first and then finally state main point in the conclusion. However, I have learned the writing style in both English and Japanese, and I feel good in English writing style more than Japanese because English writing style is more simple organization than Japanese.

"Writing Across Borders"

One point that stuck out to me from the video was about the essay style of different cultures. It's been ingrained in my brain for years now that essays are composed of the intro (tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em), the main body with at least three points (tell 'em), and the conclusion (tell 'em what you told 'em). I always thought this was silly, but redundancy enforces memory, so efficient.

It was interesting to become aware of the Japanese style of four sections with the third part being a seeming tangent to the main story, but the fourth part wraps it all together. Also, I thought the spiral approach to an essay was interesting - where the writer gets to the main point in a round-about way, and by the time the reader finds the main point, s/he already knew what it was.

Maybe Americans are less artistic with their writing, but I'd say we definitely have a defined method for formulating essays to explain our thesis.