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Carry on regardless
I have been working for a trade firm as a sales for almost 6 years. I use english English eveyday, no...
[ 2007-04-06 11:15 ]

Carry on regardless

Jackx writes:
I have been working for a trade firm as a sales for almost 6 years. I use english English eveyday, no, every moment. I suffered lots of confusion in some similar words
Today I am writing you with a hope that you could tell me the defferences amongst below words: despite(in spite of). Regardless (of). Irrespective of?

My comments:
Jackx, your writing is fraught with missspellings (everyday, defferences), punctuation problems (despite(in spite of). Regardless (of). Irrespective of) and other small and negligible lapses (english English).

I say negligible because what your lines as a whole are clear and intelligible. So therefore, DESPITE the problems, I want to encourage you to keep writing. Only in practising will you be able to improve, which is a point we'll come back to later on. Sometimes you'll perhaps get a lot of criticism, but you must carry on REGARDLESS. Learn to take it on the chin and move on. IRRESPECTIVE OF age (being young or old) and REGARDLESS OF race (being Chinese or Chilean), everyone can master a foreign language by trial and error, if they persevere in their efforts IN SPITE OF moments of painful suffering such as you are having with those words set in big letters and italic in this very paragraph, in addition to the criticism mentioned earlier.

Speaking of criticism, there are no less than 15 places in your copy that I can alter and improve on, but here I just want to point this out - you can do the revising yourself. In future writing, you may want to use a little discipline or rather self-discipline if you want to move to another level in your correspondence, for instance, with foreign clients.

Putting thoughts into words on paper is a tricky business, a lengthy process for anyone, a skill to be refined through practice, practice, practice and constantly learning from good examples. Check how other writers use particular words and copy them. George Orwell, opening an essay on the author of David Copperfield, Great Expectations and other literary gems, said: "(Charles) Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing."

From the same essay, by the way, I spotted this (see italics): "No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view."

By way of example, this is how you pick up things and learn how to put "in spite of" into actual use.

If you don't read the Orwells and the Dickenses, the same purpose can be achieved through reading, say, trade magazines and what have you. Just do it.

Keep doing it and keep doing it till one day, the cobwebs are removed from your eyes and you get that feeling of "Aha! Now I see!"

And don't stop there, either. Carry on regardless.

 

About the author:
 

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

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