My Best Friend - I met her at "Young Pianist" Contest

Hello I'm from Russia. I've been learning English for 2 years. Please help me to improve my writing skills. Thank you so much in advance :)

Nadya has been my close friend for four years. We first met each other at the third International Contest which is called "Young Pianist". She came to Podolsk from Kazakhstan, Karaganda to take part in it as I did. I met a lot of good people there. But with Nadya I spent more time than anyone else. From that day we became friends.

Nadya is a lovely girl of eighteen. She is tall and skinny. She has straight, long hair. Nadya is pale-skinned and her light brown eyes are so lively. She usually wears casual clothes, but sometimes you can see her in beautiful dresses and skirts.

Nadya has a very kind-hearted personality. She is always ready to help her friends and relatives. Moreover, she is well-mannered and polite. In spite of this, Nadya is stubborn sometimes. But I think it's a good trait of her character because she always pursues the goals.

Nadya likes to travel. She hopes she can visit all the countries in the world. Nadya also writes great poems. She brings out the best in me by being so optimistic and ambitious. She believes in herself and often makes me smile. Nadya loves children and to play with them. She has been dreaming to become a primary school teacher since the childhood. Her dream has come true this year. She has successfully finished school and entered the university.

Nadya is a great and devoted friend. I hope our friendship will never end.

Catie, I was hoping to learn more about you through your friendship with Nadya. Unfortunately, you only mentioned your friendship with her at the beginning and at the end of the essay. I am not sure what the prompt was for this paper but I really believe that it would have been helped content-wise if you had concentrated on describing Nadya to us through the friendship you shared with her. After all, it sounded like the two of you struck a deep friendship after meeting at the piano competition.

Do you have a chance to revise this essay? If you have the chance, I would suggest that you try to write it in a different way. Describe Nadya through the friendship the two of your share. There must be a reason or basis for you to say that you don't want your friendship with her to ever end. You even call her your best friend. But the reader does not learn anything about how this friendship developed to that extent. Essays like these require character description and development on the parts of both characters. In this case, that would be you and Nadya. That is a given owing to the title that you gave the essay :-)

Instead you should say "I spent more time with Nadya than with anyone else."


You should just say that she loves playing with children instead of saying that she loves children and playing with them. You could say "Nadya loves to play with children"

Try combining two short sentences together to make a longer one! You could use "and" or even just a comma to do so.

I completely agree with you. Thank you for your recommendations. I'll consider your advices when I'll write the following essay. Unfortunately, I couldn't write more about our friendship with Nadya because the task was to write an essay which consist of only 200-250 words.

Thank you again. You really helped me a lot :)

Harris, thank you very much for your help. I'm very grateful. Your corrections have really helped to make my essay better.