7th Entry

What difficulties do you have in writing in your university classes? How do you resolve these difficulties? How will you continue to improve?

In semester one of school, it took me almost a week to write a two-page report. I had so many troubles on choosing the right format, the right word and so on.

One of the difficulties I have encountered in writing in university classes is keeping it short and precise. As most of the report and essay have word or page limit, that is the reason I have keep to the word count. It forces me to select carefully which point should I put in the essay. I have not only constantly looking for new vocabularies but also rephrasing my sentences to express my ideas short and sweet. The method I am using to improve my skill is to listen. By listening to the local news, I learnt how they express a story in a short period and pick up new vocabularies at the same time. Furthermore, I do not have the habit of doing the outline for an essay. Hence, the flow of ideas would be sometimes interrupted. In order to solve this problem, I usually spend more time to understand the topic so that I can try to avoid irrelevant points.

Next, the way I phrase my sentences in Vietnamese might still somehow affect the way I write. For instance, Vietnamese language does not differentiate present prefect, present perfect continuous or past perfect tense; it gives me hard time trying to find which tense should be used during writing process. I tried to keep to simple structures to avoid mistakes and confusions.

Writing was never my favorite task in both Vietnamese and English language. It caused me many difficulties. (It is still not my favorite now). However, after this module, the more I write, the more I feel comfortable. Hopefully, it would eventually help me to overcome those difficulties to improve on my communication skills.