Portfolio Item 4

Portfolio Item 4

Basically, there are three main difficulties that I have faced in writing an academic essay. First, I lack of the skill in shortening the sentences. As a result, my essays always exceed the word limit. It was really a hard time for me to restructure and shorten them. However, with the lessons I had on reducing the clauses in EG1471, my skill seems improved but certainly there is still much room for improvement. Therefore, I have to continue to work hard on this as I believe this might be helpful for me in writing lab reports and doing project works next time. Second, before I had the lessons on the referencing, I did not even know that there is a proper way in doing so. Hence, I used to write “the author said that…” or “…(who) stated that…” without putting a proper citation in the sentence and did not even know that I need to include the referencing part at the end of the essay. Referencing is essential in essay as it helps preventing you from against the copyright policy if you quote someone’s words or ideas. Although I have not mastered it fully yet, I find myself improved in this area, too. Third, do you guys still remember the article, a comma costs millions, that shared by Mrs Jenny Gan in class? This might sound unbelievable, at least for me before I really read the article. I used to put whatever punctuation whenever and wherever I liked as long as the sentence is smooth. However, after reading this article, I tend to pay more attention to the punctuation now. This is because it might not cost me millions of dollars now if I make a punctuation mistake but I will probably develop a bad habit in using wrong punctuation if I continue ignoring it.