2008-10-17

Writing Difficulties in Engineering Classes

Being an engineering student does not mean that formulas and graphs is all my life, good English writing skills are needed because there are always lab reports, essays questions and scientific papers that waiting there. Thankfully, the most essential point for scientific writing is accuracy and efficiency. So we do not need to bother too much about the variety of sentence structures or vocabulary. However, there are numerous rules and conventions of scientific writing to follow. And most of the professors and lecturers who grade our writing products have suffered from the strict writing rules and then become quite strict with us. I wrote a scientific essay for GEK1501 when I did my bridging course. During the process of producing the essay, I find three biggest problems in my writing which are poor vocabulary and overflowing content
Though for scientific writing, a colorful expression is not expected, expressions must be accurate. Besides rules like avoiding using of first person and avoiding of unnecessary qualifiers, one of the most important points to make a lucid expression is to choose the most proper word. Which word to choose when you are describing the action in the lab report? Which word to choose when you are trying to say reducing the region of a particular object? In this professional word, changing of one word can completely change the meaning of the whole sentence and make it untrue. To choose the most suitable and precise word is essential for a good scientific writing.
Chinese style of writing prefers a large number of ideas. The more points you raise, no matter how much supporting materials you give, the better the writing is. However, for an English style of writing, it needs full interpretations for one single idea. For this reason, the number of the ideas is limited when there is a word limitation. Therefore, we must choose the most useful points. Moreover, the content needs to be organized in a clear and logical way. As we usually do lots of preparing reading before we write an essay, or we want to mention as many ideas as possible to catch the correct points in the exams, the content overflow often happens. In most cases, content overflow may make the writing unbalanced and incoherent.
Good writing skills are necessary for an engineering student. To get a higher mark in the writing assignment, I need to enlarge my vocabulary bank and improve the ability of choosing efficient ideas.