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I am not a native speaker and this is my first time ever writing an essay.
Travelling forms the mind much more than reading
Many people think reading is the only way to develop your mind but is that really true? Others say that travelling is as good as reading or even better because it gets you to experience different sort of things. In this essay I will outline the differences between this two mind-forming ideas.
Since I was little I've been always told to study a lot so I could get good marks at school and the only way I've found to do that was by reading books. On the one hand reading makes people wiser because as you analyse information you are also retaining them which trains your memory capacities. Secondly, we can put our knowledge into practise whenever the opportunity arrives because we've trained our brain to react in that way.
Consequently, the act of travelling has revealed that not only we learn more by our life experiences but we also feel more confident about ourselves. As an exemple, if we get to live in a different culture we are much more curious to know all about what it consists in order to fully integrate. This experience will give our mind the unusuals tastes of life and get us instinctively prepared for almost every problem we might have.
On the other hand, not all knowledge can be taken by reading because there are things in life that books cannot replace like feelings or memories. As already stated, feelings can be written onto the paper but they can't be felt in the way they sould to. It is a mear illusion, I would say. Additionally, we aren't able to have our own personal memories that can helps us understand things better, in a easier way. The same occurs with travelling experiences that not always shows the best of it, making us think that that's the only way things sould be without looking at the bright side or visce versa. There are also things we will never get to know only by travelling, like maths, chemestry or physics because these are things that don't usually come up on our daily lives.
To conclude, reading is as important as travelling because our mind needs to see different prespectives of life, and it can only be given by contrasting them as much as we can.
I don't know if what I've written is good that's why I'd like to know what you think about it and please correct me because I know that I have a lot of mistakes over there... 🙂
thanks!
11:31 am

Hi Danacolorado
Thanks for your essay and welcome to Writefix!
Your essay is 381 words long, which is much longer than most of the IELTS essays on this site, but as you’ve explained elsewhere your essay is not for IELTS.
However, your average sentence length is 23.8 words long. You really need to get this down. Aim for about 15 words per sentence on average. To do this, you can add some very short sentences (4-8) words, break up long sentences, and aim for only 1 or 2 ideas per sentence, rather than three or four. Having a mix of short and long sentences will add variety and impact to your essay. At the moment, the sentence structures are a little repetitive.
You have a strange five-paragraph layout
- intro
- a paragraph about how we can learn from books,
- a paragraph about we learn from travel
- a paragraph about - well, I’m not exactly sure! - I think it’s about the minuses of learning from travel or reading
- conclusion
This layout is puzzling. Your thesis sentence (the last sentence in your intro) told us that we would learn the differences between two ways of learning. Readers might expect two paragraphs (one about books, one about travel), or maybe four (a plus paragraph and a minus paragraph for books, and a plus para and minus para for travel), but it’s not really clear what your fourth paragraph is about.
My suggestion: use short topic sentences at the start of each paragraph in the body. For example:
- Books help to train the mind. OR Most schools emphasize learning from books
- In contrast, traveling builds confidence. OR Travel offers a completely different way of learning
I’m going to rewrite Paragraph Four
You wrote:
On the other hand, not all knowledge can be taken by reading because there are things in life that books cannot replace like feelings or memories. As already stated, feelings can be written onto the paper but they can't be felt in the way they sould to. It is a mear illusion, I would say. Additionally, we aren't able to have our own personal memories that can helps us understand things better, in a easier way. The same occurs with travelling experiences that not always shows the best of it, making us think that that's the only way things sould be without looking at the bright side or visce versa. There are also things we will never get to know only by travelling, like maths, chemestry or physics because these are things that don't usually come up on our daily lives.
Here’s one possible rewrite.
Books, however, cannot replace feelings and memories. Reading is a second-hand experience or an illusion, rather than something we experience, so to really understand something, we must feel it ourselves.
Traveling, too, is not always an efficient way of learning. Often our experiences of travel are too negative or too positive, so we fail to get a real picture of a place. There are also many subjects we cannot learn by traveling, such as math or chemistry, because these do not usually come up in our daily lives.
So my suggestions are to change to a four-paragraph layout or a six-paragraph layout, write shorter sentences, use very short topic sentences, and make sure that your thesis sentence helps the reader.
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