The difficulties I have in writing

My command of English has always been poor. After much thought, I realized that the fault lies in insufficient reading. To be frank, I did not favor reading storybooks when i was young. Up till now, reading has yet to be my hobby. Therefore, i have poor view of a good writing.

When I write, I usually have some kind of a mental block which discourages the flow of ideas. However, ever since i learned the skills of pre-writing in EG1471, my writing has improved by quite a bit. The lessons on idea generation and writing outline techniques are very useful for me to promote idea flow, organize my writing and also to keep track of my direction. I have been applying these techniques not only in EG1471, but also in my other academic writings such as lab reports.

Apart from having poor writing techniques, another problem i have is grammar. During my study in Polytechnic, i picked up German language and learnt it for 2 years. Now, people might wonder: What is the link between my grammar problem and German language? The problem is that German language is totally opposite of English in terms of sentence structure. For German language, the verb tends to be at the end of a sentence. This confuses me when i am writing. I tend to have wrong sentence structure, word and verb form. To tackle this problem, i need to read more English materials to correct my grammar mistakes.

Although EG1471 had equipped me the necessary skills and techniques to produce good academic writings, my command of English cannot improve without sufficient practice. Reading is also important for me to improve my grammar. Newspapers and academic articles are good materials for me to read. Nonetheless, I am thankful that i have to take EG1471 module as it made me realise my strengths and weaknesses in writing. Without it, i would still have poor essay orgaisation and grammar.

My 3 common grammar mistakes

As I was reading through my WA1 and WA2, I noticed that I had quite a few vocabulary and grammatical errors. After thorough thought, the reason for me to have quite a few vocabulary errors was because I was too ambitious with my writing; trying to use new words without confirming with thesaurus first. As for grammar, my common grammatical errors lie in verb tense, punctuations and transitions.

Verb tense is my major weakness in grammar. When writing an essay, I frequently will have “tenses dilemma”. This is because I am not sure about the correct verb tense to use. For example, “In contrast to this argument, there had been many veterinary and toxicology studies, dating from the mid 1990s, which stated that…” The mistake in the above phrase is the word “had”. While doing the essay, I thought that it should be in simple past tense because of the phrase “dating from the mid 1990s”. However, the word “had” supposed to be “has” because the studies are still being carried out in present. The lesson that I learned in order to prevent me from having the “tenses dilemma” is to use the “verb tense timeline” that we went through in class. It is useful in determining the correct tense to use whether it is simple tense, past perfect tense, future tense or etc.

I find that punctuations are complication. From the tutorials, we learned that a comma is added to prevent “run-ons” and semicolon is use similar to “and” to combine sentences. Yet, I get confused with their usage sometimes. For example, “the US, Department of energy (DOE), increased its carbon capture…” and “According to Gore (2006), CO2 being a greenhouse gas rises up all the way...” From the 1^st example, there should not be any commas in between “US” and “Department”. This is because “Department of energy (DOE)” is the subject and belongs with “the US”. It would not make sense if they were separated and it would contradict the subject of the sentence. So the correction is “the US Department of energy (DOE), increased its carbon capture…” As for the 2^nd example, the correction would be “According to Gore (2006), CO2, being a greenhouse gas, rises up all the way...” The reason for having commas is because the phrase “being a greenhouse gas” is additional information for “CO2”. In future, in order to minimise punctuation mistakes, I have to read my sentence repetitively.

Lastly, my writing lacks of transition signals. Without transition signals, I feel that my paragraph is missing something that relates it to the previous paragraph. This is unfavourable as the usage of transition ensures good flow of ideas in writings. By not having it, the content of the paragraph seem hanging and incomplete. So, I will make it a point to refer to Appendix C of our textbook whenever I write.