<doc.id=3067.a1>
<title> Writing and speaking English </title>
My major weakness in both speaking and writing is grammar in generally. My lack of grammar makes me do a lot of mistakes but fortunately it does not restrict me from speaking or writing. Another of my weaknesses is my large passive vocabulary. My speaking skill is acceptable except for my grammar mistakes. 
Since my grammatical knowledge is so limited I quite often do mistakes like write "impossibly" when it is supposed to be "impossible". Instead of thinking what kind of word (adjective, adverbs etc) I should use I just pick one that sounds good. Hopefully I will be better on that after this course. 
When I did Exercise 1 in Catch 23 I found out that I have some problems with word-order. For example I wrote "...had Alice and Thomas dreamt..." and I was suppose to write "..Alice and Thomas had dreamt..". Maybe this is not a huge weakness since it might be correct with both ways to write. 
Another of my weaknesses is that I find it very difficult to chose the right preposition after verbs, for example "plead with". I usually trust my feeling but quite often it is not right. Of course this is not an enormous problem owing to the fact that I can always look in a dictionary but when I write off the cuff it is annoying to look up words all the time. 
I have a large passive vocabulary which means that I understand the major part of words when I read but when it comes to me producing myself I find it difficult to come up with the most suitable word. I guess the solution on this problem is practising. 
I am quite comfortable when I speak English in every day use but my inability to use my passive vocabulary restricts me in deeper conversations.
My strength in speaking is the pronunciation. For example I imagine that I do not do the typical Swedish pronunciation mistakes like for example children, John etc. On the other hand my speaking is affected by carelessness that results in grammatical mistakes.
</doc>