Opening Statement

Opening Statement

This is a portfolio presenting my writing accomplishment in ELSO5060 during 2012 spring. According to the course setup, the first group of my work including the genere analysis, the literature review, and the conference proposal were majorly for practicing and adapting to the writing style in my academic field. Facilitated and supported by the first part of my work, the most important, practical, and also my favorite part of my work in the course is the draft of my thesis summarizing my two-year work for my master degree.

The instructor helped us on various topics and gave professional direction on the English academic writing through which I achieved great improvement and corrected several of my old bad habits in English writing. For example, I did not pay much attention to the article using throughout my writing and I started to use them appropriately during writing up and revising. Moreover, I was not used to apply conjunction in my articles showing proper logic correlation in the context, while I have solved this problem during the practicing and added more sentence variety in my writing.

Though I enhanced my writing ability in such short period of time, some defects should still be pointed out and corrected in future writing. I always make mistakes on single vs. plural form and tense of verbs, realizing they are easily to be detected and corrected but also easier to be made. Plus, adding sentence variety into my writing is a challenge for me to cover because I have to balance between showing precise logic sequence and elegance during writing.

My capability of academic writing has been proved by my work in this portfolio. After several round of revising, grammatical mistakes have been reduced while more sentence variety has been added up. Additionally, my writing speed has been improved during this course, which showed English writing posing much less obstacle to me as English is my second language.