Time passes without mercy, more than two months have passed since my very first day in NUS. As an engineering undergraduate, writing academic essays focusing on engineering are unavoidable. Of course, I have been facing some difficulties in writing them, even for now. Here, I am ready to share them with you all.
First, the style of academic writing is totally different with what I have used to be. I have been writing mainly narrative essays all the time since I was in primary school, all the way until Sijil Tinggi Pelajaran Malaysia (STPM, equivalent to A-Level). Due to my familiarity in writing narrative essays, which do not require a straight-forward style to introduce a point, I have been encountering problems in writing academic essays. I have been struggling for a long time to write a good thesis statement in formal academic essays, because no matter how well I wrote it, I will feel that the sentence is not very attractive, like what a narrative essays' sentence should have, and this wasted most of my time. However, after this two months of EG1471, I am feeling some improvements in my writing of academic essays. I hope that it is not just my feeling, but truth.
Second, my engineering-related vocabulary is insufficient. Due to the same reason, my vocabulary is formed by mainly those for story writing, which are usually unsuitable for academic essays. Hence, searching for a suitable word to convey my idea has become my second problem. The exercises in "Focus on Vocabulary" has really helped me a lot. It contains many academic-related words that we should know to have a smooth progress in writing. However, I have not encountered any problems in writing the short answers in MLE1101 yet. Furthermore, after enhancing myself with these necessary words, I think I won't feel big problems in expressing my ideas in the coming MLE1101 questions.
These are the two main problems that I have encountered so far. There are still some other grammar problems such as modals and articles, but they are not so serious in my case.
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13 years ago
5 comments:
Yes,i agree with you.academic essay and narative writing are definitely two very different styles of writing.Switching from one style to another is not an easy thing to do for writer as the type of words used might be quite different
writing in engineering class is not an easy task and it requirs you to have a strong background about what you write and be expert in using words and sentence structures. In addition , you have also to think critically or seriously about your writing scenario, such as how much your readers can understand the writing or how they will feel about it. Generally, it requires a writer to spend a lot of time and efforts to finish a perfect writing.
I am in the same situation as you.
Argumentative essay is certainly new to me. I never wrote an argumentative essay before in my previous years of study. What we can do is to read more related articles and also improve on our vocabulary.
yeah, we should read more and write more, it need time for us to make products.
Yes, I agree with you that thesis statement is also difficult to write. This module teaches me how to write thesis statement.
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