One of the most important ways to present your ideas is writing which can help you disseminate your opinions to others. Hence, I have to be very serious about making an academic writing with a lot of efforts and strict choice of words. Because writing is also a main factor to make readers appreciate your whole work, so your ideas may be degraded by an ambiguous, unimpressive, or unclear writing even if the ideas are utmostly excellent. And for me, I also find some difficulties in writing critically about engineering topics because most of the topics are very academic and they could take me a bulk amount of time to finish.
In fact, writing about an engineering topic is not really easy because I have to comprehend the input information which I read before I start writing. In this circumstance, the main obstacle is about vocabularies. It means that I may face with many strange or new words which I have never seen before when I read engineering information, such MLE textbook or lecture notes. Thus, the first thing I have to do is to take note of them and try to memorize by practicing using those words many times or learning by heart. In addition to writing down new word, I also have to pronounce them correctly and clearly to store the words in my memory for a long time. In my opinion, if someone wants to improve their writing skill, they have to enlarge their word power beforehand.
Moreover, to write an academic subject require not only to choose relevant or correct words but also to use clear sentence structures to help readers understand easily what I want to say. I think it shouldn’t show off one’s expertise by using very complex sentence structures because sometimes they can make readers confused due to misunderstand the content or also make authors dizzy with some their fragment errors. Applying simple sentence structures with smooth linking words and strongly supporting words is quite enough for a completely best writing which everyone find easy to understand, rather than using a lot of confusingly complex sentence structures with difficult words. The important thing is just to write straight forward and smoothly, do not try to make yourself get stuck and confuse your readers.
Basically, writing is also a factor which is resulted by your English level. Therefore, I think the best way to improve my English skill is to practice frequently with others, such as my classmates or tutors. And one more imperative tip is not to avoid talking just because of being shy with your speaking, let always remember that you are practicing to improve yourself. As a result, you will remember new word deeply and know what kind of sentence structure you should apply to a particular case.
In conclusion, writing in engineering class is not an easy task and it require 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 require writer to spend a lot of time and efforts to finish successfully done or perfect writing.
5 comments:
I am able to understand with what Nam has mentioned in his portfolio four that writing in engineering class in not an easy task. As it required one to have a strong background on what you want to write in order to bring out the correct message to the reader. In engineering context of academic writing, it has a different perspective than those story essay writing. Therefore, when Nam said that we need to comprehend the input information of the engineering content reasonably well before we can put into writing, I agreed with him strongly on this point. Engineering academic writing are not fairly tale story, it is being informative and provide good contents to the reader. I would like to conclude that Nam has pointed out the importance of academic writing in engineering context; it can only be improve with constant practice and only with good informative inputs of engineering background.
Agreed. Practices make perfect, we should always try to challenge our weakness in order to improve it, instead of avoid it. Besides, I also agree that engineering-related writing requires writer to comprehend the information very well. Without a true understanding, we may end up with a writing that is not convincing and misleading.
I agree with Nam that writing in engineering class is not simple. However in engineering classes, we do not need to write bombastic english as what we usually write in our reports or essay questions are quite straightforward.
Perhaps the difficult part is the use of the scientific term, they are stranger to us as we never came across them before. I think that Nam suggestion of writing short and smooth sentences is a good practice as it keeps our report or essay readable and easy to understand.
However, for english essays, the choice of words are important. Writing an english essay is different from other engineering modules and we require strong vocabulary. Perhaps one way to improve vocabulary is look up for words with similar meaning that we usually used from thesaurus and learn from there.
Writing in academic context is not easy, especially for those who come from non-English speaking countries (like me). From your essay, i learn some new methods to deal with difficulties in academic writing. And I strongly agree that practice make perfect.
It is indeed true for an engineering-related writing to be tough because understanding the topic takes alot of time and we really need to understand the topic before we can put it into writing. Therefore, I agree with Nam that the writing should not be showing off one's expertise by using very complex sentence structures otherwise the reader will get confused.
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