Portfolio 4

What difficulties do you have writing in your engineering classes? You may use your work in MLE 1101 to give examples. How do you resolve the difficulties? How will you continue to improve? Use approximately 300 words.

During our engineering classes, we are given tutorials to complete upon after respective lectures to ensure that we are able to grasp the concept and apply it on problem-solving questions. For a chemical engineering student like me, I am pre-allocated with MA1505, a mathematics module for all engineering students and MLE 1101, material science and engineering module that is taken by some of the engineering students this semester. MA1505 module emphasizes mainly on calculations which only require minimal writing, but MLE 1101 is different. It requires calculations and conceptual and application-solving writing skills in completing tutorial questions.
Sometimes, I could not express my answer directly to the questions’ requirement due to sentence structure problems, lack of key terms pertaining to the question or excessive irrelevant ideas mentioned. These few reasons would naturally result in the loss of precious marks during tutorials and examinations as well. Then moving on to grammatical mistakes that I usually commit, although it may not be a vital component in MLE classes, the proper use of words, grammatically correct sentences and appropriate style of writing would definitely convey a positive impression to the tutors.
To resolve these problems, always read the question carefully to look out for the main ideas that it is asking for. It not just only applies to MLE, it basically applies to all other modules as well, especially in modules which emphasize on good writing skills. Another good method is to focus on the key terms mentioned in the lecture notes and apply it appropriately to the questions. Understanding the concept is also another important factor that leads to effective and enhanced ease of writing.
However, we should also be tackling on the root causes of problems encountered in writing skills by conscientiously improving on our proper use of English in terms of writing, reading and speaking as well. Since I am currently taking EG1471, it serves as an ideal platform in resolving the language problems I am weak in, and at the same time, it also enables me to venture to other new aspects of effective writing. Other than in school, I would allocate some personal time to read newspapers, magazines and online articles to further improve my standard of English as well.