Every good thing will come to an end. The final e-portfolio.

It is finally the last e-portfolio. In this assignment, we are asked to reflect on what difficulties do I face in writing for my engineering classes and how will I continue to improve?

Before taking this class, my vocabulary and grammar are really bad and I usually scored very low marks because the professor cannot understand what I mean. Quantitative-wise, I have no problem but when it comes to explaining my proposal, the readers always cannot get what I mean and therefore have no choice but to give me low marks. However, after this class, both my vocabulary and grammar improve sustainability and now I am able to write quite well. This class has prepared me well for the future project write-up I will encounter.

However, I still some problem of lack of vocabulary sometimes. For example, I always tend to use the word "found" throughout my report. For example, they are a lot of things that can need the word "found" (e.g. I found that hydrogen combined with oxygen make water, I found that the length is 10m). Although I used Microsoft word synonyms function very often to look for word that replaces "found", the synonyms function always gave me the same few words which I have to repeatedly use also.

In order to solve the problem I described, I looked up the journals and realised that the authors used different phrasing sometimes to vary the sentence structures. Thus, I feel that in order to improve continuously, I will need to find creative ways to learn and improve my English. Also, I recently discovered a nice way to improve my writing, that is to use google as a help tool. For example, if I want to write a sentence "the best thing since" but I forget the whole sentence, I can type "the best thing since" and google will tell me it is "The best thing since sliced bread".

Good luck to everyone in this module for the rest of his/her learning journey.

common grammar mistakes

I made many grammatical mistakes throughout this course. I am happy that this course has taught me a lot of ways to improve my English.
A confusion that I have is the usage of “had” versus “have”. For example, the sentence is “The school has a canteen on level 2”. I have always reminded myself that it is not appropriate to use had in this sentence as the canteen is still at level 2. I believe why this problem arises is because in the past, I was taught to use the same tense for my composition. Thus, I have the tendency to use past tense for my composition.
Another mistake that I commonly make is to put speech into words directly. Until recently, I finally realize that it is not appropriate to do that as it sounds very informal. For example, I wrote the phase “pros and cons” in my report. I was told that it is inadvisable to do so and doing it makes the report informal. There are many better ways to express the idea.
The third mistake is I sometimes have trouble identifying whether to use which, whom, who and where. For example, in the past, I was told that the word “where” is associated with a place. However, I do not understand where people can use “where” to associate with time. For example, “There will be months where there are only four Mondays as the first trading day of the month is not a Monday”. It is very confusing as my school teacher always told me to use when for something that is associated with time.
These are three common mistakes that I make. I believe that I have made many others along my journey of learning English language. In few years time, I hope to master the language so as to write a perfect report!