The Grand Finale - difficulties, solutions, and future improvements

Before the QET test, I was thinking to myself, “its just an English test, I can easily pull it off”. As a person who converses in English most of the time, I was obviously over-confident and thought that I could never fail the test even how badly I wanted to. I was wrong. After a semester being in an EG1471 class, I realized how much I’ve been lacking, in terms of the English language.

EG1471 has taught me a lot about one of my major weakness, academic writing. I have always had difficulties writing reports or essays during my polytechnic days, and especially in semester 1 in NUS. One of the difficulties I encounter during writing is that I don’t have a clear organization of points in my head. Most of the time, I will have fragments of information scattered about in my thoughts, and to pen it down in an organized manner, it takes a long time. From the lessons in EG1471, I learned more about pre-writing techniques such as idea generations, essay outlines and drafts. These techniques helped me a lot in cutting down my writing time.

Apart from that, through years of chatting on the internet as well as speaking “singlish”, I tend to use incorrect grammar. This affects my academic writings, and also makes me more dependants on Microsoft Word’s “spell check”, to see if my sentences are correct. One thing that I learned is that by reading and practicing proper English in a day to day basis, I can get rid of the bad habits and have a greater command of proper English. So, I have been reading magazines and newspapers whenever I have the time to.

Even though the EG1471 module has come to an end, that doesn’t stop me to further improve my English. Speaking proper English, as well as reading articles on a day to day basis seems to be a fail-safe way to improve my English. Probably I would also continue blogging, as blogging gives me a chance to practice my writing skills. During the vacation, I’m also thinking of picking up an interesting novel to read, say “Tuesdays with Morrie” by Mitch Albom.

It's fine to make mistakes, as long as we learn from them

Three of my most common grammatical mistakes are in the areas of the subject-verb agreement, parallelism and pronoun reference.

Subject-verb agreement (SVA)

As the name implies, when constructing a sentence, the subject and its verb must agree with each other in order for the sentence to make sense. I personally find this section of grammar particularly difficult as sometimes, the subject can be separated from the verb. Other than that, the SVA can also change due to the nature of the subject, such as if the subject is singular or plural, or if it is countable or uncountable.

Examples:

1) My mother said that living in big cities are not good for health. (wrong)
My mother said that living in big cities is not good for health. (correct)

2) There is some mistakes in your sentence. (wrong)
There are some mistakes in your sentence. (correct)


Parallelism

The basic definition of parallelism is to make two or more words or clauses parallel, or have the same idea or level of importance. Parallel structures are mainly broken down into two parts, which are logical parallelism and grammatical parallelism. The parallel structure of the sentence can easily disappear just by mistyping a few words in a sentence. This will be shown in the examples below.

Examples:

1) The three main races in Malaysia are the Malays, Chinese, and the Indians. (wrong)
The three main races in Malaysia are the Malays, the Chinese and the Indians. (correct)

2) Jack loves swimming, canoeing and to ride a bicycle. (wrong)
Jack loves swimming, canoeing and cycling. (correct)


Pronoun reference

A pronoun reference is used when the writer wants to refer to the subject again without rewriting the whole subject of the sentence again. Normally, a sentence will carry an ambiguous meaning if the pronoun reference is not used properly.

Examples:

1) Take the shoes out of the box and throw it away. (faulty)
Here, “it” can refer to the shoes or the box.

Take the shoes out of the box and throw the box away. (clear)

2) The teachers told their students that they would be having a day off tomorrow. (faulty)
‘it’ may refer to the teachers or the students.

The teachers told their students that the students would be having a day off tomorrow.(clear)