English became the most wide-spread language in the world. It is estimated that the world has about three hundred seventy five million people who speak English as a first language, another three hundred seventy five million who speak English as a second language and seven hundred fifty million people who speak English as a foreign language. We as Maltese fall under the group that uses English as our second language. As one can notice, all official notes published in Malta are printed in English and similarly so do our academic books. So by hook or by cook I, as an under graduate student have to deal with the problem of writing good English. It is not an easy task for me to write academic papers in English considering the fact that this language is not my mother tongue. From an early age our standard of English writing is given a great importance and we are thought to pay attention to our grammatical problems.
            
             A major obstacle I come across when I sit on my desk-chair to do an essay is that of expressing my thoughts. I often feel that I know what I mean but don't know how to jut it down on the paper. I usually sense that my sentences can be stronger, clearer, shorter and thus more effective but I never made an end to my ideal sentence makeup and I always end up writing long boring sentences. This is by all means the consequence of lack in English reading from my side. When writing in English I usually fall in a dilemma whether I'm using the verb tenses correct or not. I generally have problems using past-tense, which makes all of my paper works weaker. Another common blockage I come upon in my English writing occurs when I come to quote. I'm still not accustomed in the way of describing extracted media.
             More often than not my thoughts don&ap...