Writing difficulties in university classes

In this portfolio, I have explained the difficulties I faced when writing in university classes and how I managed to overcome it.

Although, most of the engineering work involves calculations, there are certain parts which need us to express our opinion on the problem. For example, if we conduct an experiment, we are supposed to write a report on what is the objective and describe about the experiment and compare the results. Other that writing experimental reports, most of the time we have to write project reports. Before EG1471 class, if I am supposed to write a report on my project, I will just start blindly without any outline or mind map. So in between the report I used to get confused and waste time in tracing back what I have written. But after EG1471 class, I have started writing the report by outlining the main ideas first.

For instant, in a module called EE2007, I outlined what I am going to write first and generated the ideas by thinking what I have done for my project. Secondly, I started the report by giving a brief introduction of the project, and then followed by a flowchart of my content and the main idea. I really felt very satisfied for the report than any other previous reports. I am very thankful for having the EG1471 this semester, since I have learnt quite a lot of stuffs which I can use for other modules.

In addition, in order to improve the standard of writing the usage of good vocabulary is necessary. When I was writing any essay, I just used simple words to express the content. But now I realized that I need to improve my writing standard to the university level by adding appropriate vocabularies. I used the website http://thesaurus.reference.com/ to get the list of words which has the same meaning but used differently depending on the context. For example, for the word “opinion”, I can replace the word with “notion”, “assumption” and “estimation” depending on the content of my essay. This may also increase our writing skills.

As a conclusion, I believe that my writing skills can be improved through step by step process which includes mind mapping, proper outlining, flowcharts and final report. Good usage of vocabularies also aids improve my writing skills.