My name is Sean Na from South Korea, a 24-year-old journalism student committed to becoming a newspaper journalist in the United States.

I want to be a journalist writing stories in English. It is a dream that I have been pursuing ever since I was 13 years old. Even though Korean is my native language, I have written in English a hundred times more than I have written in Korean.

Would this mean then – I am a good English writer?; I can write 10 consecutive English sentences without asking someone to look for a or more grammar and style errors?; and my English writing skills are proficient enough to work as a journalist in the U.S.?

My answer to them is “not quite yet.”

Having written in English for almost seven years and stories for publication for almost two years,  I should have not been vigilant of grammar and style errors whenever writing in English. But I still am.

I want to be a journalist, who is writing stories that render a sense of intimacy to the community I serve. But without being able to write English sentences clear enough for the readers to easily grasp the points, I would not have my dream come true, and would have to hunt for another job to make a few dollar.

But this thought is nowhere in my mind, at least right now.

I was fortunate enough that I have worked at two of the well-known news media – Associated Press and Bloomberg Bureau of National Affairs. When someone hears of my reporting experiences, he or she often calls me an excellent writer thinking places like the AP and Bloomberg would not hire a poor English writer. Well, they might have done it in my case.

While I was at the AP, I wrote multiple stories that were mostly breaking news. I had at maximum 45 minutes to finish a story. Grammar and style were out of my consideration when dealing with breaking news situations. My whole focus was on fulfilling the required word count and sending it off to editors. In fact, I have rarely read a published version of any of my stories, albeit knowing that only a few words of mine, or maybe none, would survive through a hard-cut editing.

I always resisted myself to be self-embarrassed by realizing my whole original writing becomes ripped off by someone professional. It is in fact that I may have not wanted to admit to myself that I was a bad writer. But I was, and I still am.

Nobody has called an attention in my English writing. But Michael Trimarchi, a veteran journalist with more than 40 years experience as a newspaper reporter and editor, gave me the first wake-up call.

Trimarchi was my editor at Bloomberg BNA this summer. I only worked with him for 10 weeks, but I will never forget the words he told me gracefully.

He told me: “Sean, you need a lot of practice in English writing. You are not on a level of becoming a journalist in the U.S. You will need to fix your English language, unless you intend to go back to Korea and write stories in Korean.”

The very first wake-up call that I had long been waiting to hear happened a few weeks before my senior year in the journalism school.

He and I were editing my 800-word story. I had more than 40 corrections on that story. And he was explicit in pinpointing what I needed to fix. Subject-verb agreement, proper use of punctuations, articles and words, and awkward English sentences are the things he told me to fix.

He said he admired me striving to be a journalist in the U.S. He even said the English language is one of the most difficult languages to learn to write. But he also warned me if I did not fix my English, I would have a very hard time finding a reporting job in the U.S.

I still struggle with a constant fear whenever I write an English sentence. I am still very wary of my unconscious mistake in English grammar and style. It has almost been my large stumbling block. I do not expect I will completely overcome this fear, but it is the fear that I will continue to embrace throughout my career as a journalist.

Trimarchi handed me a compilation of short stories by Ernest Hemingway on my last day at Bloomberg BNA. When I looked behind the cover page, there were five words written by Michael Trimarchi.

“Keep the words flowing, Sean.”