So far I have entered in University for one year. Comparing study in polytechnic, one of the most difficult parts for me is report writing as university level report is not only required to be understandable, but also is required to be well-organized and coherent. The difficulties in my essay writing are idea generation, short of vocabulary and organization of the essay. Throughout the whole semester study on EG1471, it helped me to clear some of my problems in essay writing and guided me how to writing a good university level academic essay.
In EG1471 class, I have learnt how to generate ideas for an essay by using mind map, which shows the concepts, relationships, associations and consequences altogether and makes connection among these things. By using this technique, it could lead me to come out more useful ideas to the essays. Having useful ideas helps me to outline my essay much more easily.
Furthermore, I have learnt tow different types of essay comparison/contrast essay and argumentative essay. For comparison/contrast essays, we can use either point-by-point organization or block to explain the similarities and the differences between two items. Comparison and contrast is a very common pattern in most university academic writing. In argumentative essay session, I learnt how to express my point of view in an essay and how to convince readers that my opinion is right by giving examples to support myself ideas and argue with opponents’.
In conclusion, to further develop my essay writing I still need to improve the vocabulary as most of essays are technical essays. So using the appropriate vocabularies is required in order to express the ideas more accurately. Meanwhile, I also need more reading to help me to enlarge my ‘database’ because I cannot always rely on Internet. With more information in my brain, I think my essay writing can be more efficient. Although EG1471 will be finished shortly, my study will not be stopped.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
Summary of common grammatical mistakes
Upon reviewing the writing assignment 1 and 2, I can conclude there are three common grammatical mistakes that are usually made in my essay writings.
The first common grammatical mistake is using wrong prepositions. I found that preposition is very tricky when try to describe position between two objects. For example:
Incorrect: I travelled China this year
Correct: I travelled across China this year
Preposition is hard for Chinese student as we are non-native English speakers because English preposition might have two or more translations in mandarin. That’s why it is very confusing when writing an essay.
The second common grammatical error made in my essay frequently is tense. Especially, I am always confused by perfect tense and past perfect tense.
Incorrect: The project has been finished last month.
Correct: The project had been finished last month.
Here I want to express that the project has been finished, but it was done in last month. So it has to use past perfect tense.
The last common grammatical error is run-on sentence. Sometimes in one sentence that joins two independent clauses without punctuation or appropriate conjunction. For example
Incorrect: Rachel is very smart, she began reading when she was three years old.
Correct: Rachel is very smart. She began reading when she was three years old.
The error is also can be corrected by changing ‘,’ to ‘;’.
In conclusion, throughout the course EG1471, it helped me to improve my English essay writing. I believe that EG1471 will also help me to write better essay in my following studies.
The first common grammatical mistake is using wrong prepositions. I found that preposition is very tricky when try to describe position between two objects. For example:
Incorrect: I travelled China this year
Correct: I travelled across China this year
Preposition is hard for Chinese student as we are non-native English speakers because English preposition might have two or more translations in mandarin. That’s why it is very confusing when writing an essay.
The second common grammatical error made in my essay frequently is tense. Especially, I am always confused by perfect tense and past perfect tense.
Incorrect: The project has been finished last month.
Correct: The project had been finished last month.
Here I want to express that the project has been finished, but it was done in last month. So it has to use past perfect tense.
The last common grammatical error is run-on sentence. Sometimes in one sentence that joins two independent clauses without punctuation or appropriate conjunction. For example
Incorrect: Rachel is very smart, she began reading when she was three years old.
Correct: Rachel is very smart. She began reading when she was three years old.
The error is also can be corrected by changing ‘,’ to ‘;’.
In conclusion, throughout the course EG1471, it helped me to improve my English essay writing. I believe that EG1471 will also help me to write better essay in my following studies.
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