Write about a journey where you got lost to send to the magazine.

late at the hotel

This happened a few years ago. My friend and I had rented a hotel in Da Nang city for the summer holiday. We were going to first plane to Hue city to stay for 2 days, and then drive from Hue to Da Nang.

The first part of the journey was exciting. We were sailing on the Huong river, the famous river of Hue and associated woth the history of Hue. While sitting on the boat, we are also heard the tranditional song of Hue people. After that, we released paper boats on river to pray lucky for ourself. On the second day, we went to eat Hue special food and prepared to go to Da Nang.

The problem started to happen. When we were going in the wrong direction and we had to take a detour instead of going straight. It took us 4 hours. Everything wasn't getting better. When we were going to the city center, we got lost again. We didn't know where we were. We asked somebody around us and found out we turned left instead of right. We had to turn round and go back in the opposite direction and we had wasted nearly 2 hours to finding a hotel!

When we arrived at the hotel where we hired before, it was too late! We were late more than an hour so had another guest rented. Then, I asked them if we would rent another room, they said that they were sorry all them rooms are full occupied and my deposit was refunded to my account. After that, we needed to find a room in a new hotel. Fortunately, there is an empty hotel room nearby. We quickly got there. Finally, we had booked the room. Although the trip had many problems with straying, but in the end everything was fine. We had such a exciting memorable holiday!

- "then drive from Hue ..." tense "drove"
- "We were sailing on the ..." - I think you should use sailed, no any special time for using past cont
- "we are also heard ..." tense "were"
- "When we were ... and we had to take ..." should use "because" or "so"...
- "all them rooms are full" tense "their", "were"

General"
- You should be careful with tense, a lot of mistakes

Hi Nicole, it appears that you have confused some of the commonly used English words in your essay. "turn round" does not make sense because "round" is the depiction of a circular shape. "Turn around" means to create a circle that connects back to a certain point, thus creating a full circle. You also need to be careful of the conjunction portions of your sentences such as when you said "occupied and my deposit..." a comma should have been placed between "occupied, and my deposit..." The comma indicates the combining of 2 connected ideas in one sentence.

Then there is the mistake about when to use "a" or "an" in a sentence. When a word starts with a vowel sound the determiner "an" is always used, just as the determiner "a" is used for consonant sounding words. You also need to brush up on your vocabulary. Make sure that the words you use are found in the English dictionary and that it makes sense when used in a sentence. There is no such word as "woth". It appears that you were trying to use the term "with" instead. Proofreading your paper after you have completed the draft should help you avoid these common errors. The same goes for the words "tranditional, ourself (should be ourselves), as well as a spelling difference for the word center, which is the American English spelling that has the UK English counterpart "centre".

Your narrative has much more sentence structure errors which comes from your being an ESL user. There are too many of them to give you free advice on at this point. However, I would like to point out that if you continue to familiarize yourself with English sentence structures through the use of American and/or British reading materials, this problem should clear itself up in no time. The good news, is that even with all of the grammatical and sentence structure errors involved, you were able to tell your story in a manner that the reader could easily decipher due to the use of proper clue words in your essay.

I have to tell you though, the essay took too long to get to the point. As a reader, I did not need the detailed description of your visit, what I needed was a simple backstory then a focus on how you got lost and what happened because you got lost. Next time, write an overview introduction for the non-essential story representation, before launching into the central storyline.