Saturday, April 11, 2009

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.

1 comment:

  1. You might want to try using the web sites which suggest a suitable word to replace the vocabulary, for example, dictionary.com or m-w.com are 2 web sites I could recommend. Do check them out, hope it helps. =)

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