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.