显示标签为“Portfolio_4”的博文。显示所有博文
显示标签为“Portfolio_4”的博文。显示所有博文

2008年10月14日星期二

Difficulties in English writing in Engineering

When I am doing writing in my engineering classes, I often encounter difficulties with regard to English. They arise from, for example, vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar. Take MLE1101 as an example, I often don’t know how to describe the phenomenon and how to come up with the proper and accurate explanation because of the limit of my vocabulary. When I want to picture the extend of a certain reaction, I just come up with words like “great””light” or “mild”; I cannot distinguish the minor differences between different reactions under various conditions. The second problem is about the sentence structure. When I am doing the engineering writing, I always focus on the technical problem. Together with the problem of lack of vocabulary, I often write quite long sentences, which makes my writing verbose and inaccurate. This also makes my writing loses my point. These problems appear more obvious in my study of MLE1101, which needs a large amount of technical vocabulary of material science and abundant explanations. I have kept reading the textbook and jot down the new key words to memorize them, so I can easily grasp them when I do my writing. Through the large amount of reading, I have also learnt how to write in a more professional way. In addition, when I review the lecture notes and interpret the graphs, I also try my best to think out the answer in my own words and in complete sentences rather than fragments of phrases or words. This, meanwhile, helps me comprehend the concepts deeper and better. Other than the methods mentioned above, I think I need more effective and efficient solutions to these problems. For example, I should try to apply what I have learnt in EG1471 in the writing of MLE1101 instead of just focusing on the newly-encountered concepts and equations.
Total words: 305