Portfolio 4 Li Lu
Whenever I have to do my engineering assignment, I always find it a difficult and frustrating task. This is not only because to write an academic essay, we must have a certain amount of technical background and professional knowledge, but also because we have to form the academic style. Sometimes I really have something to write or to say, but what makes me crazy is to find the best way to show it in proper academic English. I have problems in writing logically and cohesively, so it is challenging for me to convince my readers.
While writing academic English, I have problems mainly in the following three aspects:
First, I find myself deeply influenced by my mother tongue. I grew up in China and received my previous education there. So my previous knowledge about engineering and techniques are all in Chinese sentence structures, deeply rooting in my head. When I am using that information, I am quite afraid that my sentences are heavily influenced by Chinese structure. In order to ensure that my readers canS understand them, I sometimes have to see the English sentences from the original sources very often, and in this way I may trap in the plagiarism.
Second, it is not easy to illustrate what I mean precisely. In an informal talk, a listener can always interrupt and ask for clarification and most of these conversations deal with topics of shared and developing ideas. However, in academic writing, this is not possible as we usually do with professional issues in a certain field which may not be familiar with ordinary people. So how to express my ideas as exactly as possible worries me a lot.
Third, it seems very confused for me to write according to the conventions of the subject. Because of the difficulty of the content, different fields have developed different habits of thought and expression to help communication. So as students, we have to learn the technical vocabulary of the subject, which takes a lot of efforts.
Besides the three challenges above, to fulfill the academic requirements, we have to get references and look for reliable sources, and I think it is also a nightmare because it may take a lot of time.
Although facing so many obstacles, I will not give up. I try to solve them by reading more academic essays and remember some useful sentence structures. Moreover, there are many sources in SELF and the book “Focus on Vocabulary” is especially designed for our vocabulary problems. By reading more about these books as well as participating in EF1471, I am sure I can have a great progress in writing academic English.
Humble
14 years ago
2 comments:
I agree with your first point about the difference between Chinese and English. This two languages are from two completely diferent branches and have no similar roots that led to many difference. For example, subject of a sentence is often placed in at the end of the sentence in Chinese but moved to the front in English.
Chinese is ranked one of the difficult language in the world, so if you can master it well, I believe you can also do as well in English if given the time and your effort.
I also agree on your third point especially that most of our reports will be read by professors who are experts in the field. Research is often is a must in writing a report to find out the right techincal term to use.
good effort to fight your handicapped in english usage. I also gathered many useful vocabularly from SELF. I guess we all have the same problem and reading is the best solution to our problem.
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