我經常跟學生說，母語是中文的華人，想寫得一手優雅流暢的英文，其中一個秘訣是，練習時遇上困難，不要老是認為「這是因英文不是我的母語。」因寫作對英文是母語的人來說，也很困難，如果華人把英文寫作困難歸咎於「英文不是我的母語」，可能永遠也培養不出克服困難的能力和動力。

以英國升中試Eleven Plus爲例，哪怕是本地家長，也經常在論壇吐槽英文卷的creative writing有多難。一個由英國媽媽們發起的網站The School Run，就這樣解釋Eleven Plus對writing的要求：「11+ examiners will want to see that your child has good ideas, so encourage them to think of an original twist on the subject matter they’re given.」顯然，單是technical mastery of English不一定能拿到高分，還需要在ideas層面下苦功。

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下面的學生文章，沒文法錯誤，用詞恰當，句子結構也有variety，但在idea層面就比較薄弱，故事既沒高潮也沒滿意的結局，所以拿到高分的機會不大。再下面是我的rewrite，試圖彌補原文的欠缺。

Eleven Plus topic given: “When I was Lost”

Student’s version

My hike in the the mountains outside my native city of St Petersburg was turning into a nightmare. It was so cold that my teeth kept chattering. The snow was so heavy that I couldn’t see a thing. I was lost. 

Night came and there was dead silence except for the howling of wolves. I was so afraid I  would get eaten. Gingerly I walked along some narrow paths, hoping I could find my way out. Alas, all I saw were more mountains. Suddenly my luck changed (or so I thought): I spotted a hut nestled among some hemlock trees. I rushed inside and lighted a campfire. Because I was so exhausted, I fell asleep immediately. In my sleep I heard some footsteps. At first I thought it was the wolves. The door opened and it was another hiker. He shared some of his food with me. The next day he led me back to St Petersburg. 

My rewrite

At one point, despite the months of rehabilitation I had undergone, whenever I saw glistening pieces of raw meat hanging in the canteen kitchen, my first instinct was still to grab and devour them….

“The Lost Boy,” the media christened me. It was speculated that when I was still a toddler, my parents perished in one of those blizzards so common in the harsh Siberian winters, and a wolf mother treated me as one of her cubs. By the time I was discovered by loggers, I was already eight years old, totally mute, with the gestures and dietary preferences of wolves.

Soon, men and women in thick glasses and white coats put me under observation, dying to find out whether humans can still learn to speak when well past the prime learning period. When they discovered that even after months of intensive classes  I couldn’t even mouth vowels, they concluded that I was forever lost and wrote scholarly papers featuring me as a subject.

The arms and legs of the lab staff who first attempted to put clothes on me still bore the scars from my scratching. I had never worn clothes and would never do. I once saw him jot down in his notebook “Subject has no concept of nakedness and is incapable of feeling shame.”

The day finally came when the science people gave up on ever turning me into a human. PETA wrote to the White House pointing out it was cruel to try to deprive me of my wolfness. I was eventually flown to Siberia and released back into the wild. The first thing I did after I got my freedom back was to look for my wolf family: I had to share with them the choicest cut of steak I had stolen from the canteen kitchen when my human minders weren’t looking!

（Notice how, in my version, I was able to come up with an original twist on the meaning of “lost”:  though outsiders deem the wolf-child narrator “lost” when he returns to Siberia at the end of the story, from his point of view, he has simply gone back to the place he is most at home with.）