Critical Reflection: My Academic Writing

It has definitely been a long three months since the start of the semester and knowing that I had to bid for ES1102. Looking back, it can be described as a series of unfortunate events that somehow led to something fortunate as ending up in tutorial group E02.

Before even entering the university, I had heard multiple negative remarks about ES1102: it takes up too much of your time, taking it does not give you any module credits, the list goes on. I was definitely hoping that I would not have to take this module. When the results of the QET showed that I had to take ES1102, I felt that I was done for.

The first tutorial session started off awkward for me, but it become more relieving. I was late for the lesson as I have never been in the Engineering faculty before (I am (un)fortunately the only Chemistry student in this time slot) and when I entered the room, people were already conversing with one another. The really nice tutor then approached me, telling me to take a seat and then interact with the people around me. I did so, albeit awkwardly, but gradually I opened up to a few classmates. After the short introduction between peers, Ms. Anita (the tutor) then provided us with the lesson plan of this module. Upon seeing the lesson plan, I definitely heaved a sigh of relief. There were rumors of some tutors demanding assignments biweekly for reasons unknown, and there were tutors requesting only a few assignments for grading. Ms. Anita's requirements was definitely manageable, and it definitely did not contain any ridiculous biweekly assignments of any form.

The lessons conducted were definitely stress-free and the build-up to writing the essay was really smooth: We started off with grammar structures, how academic writing looks like, and then the vocabulary used in academic writing. It slowly proceeded to writing a summary of a list of articles, and techniques on how to approach summary writing were done in class. This allowed us to discuss among ourselves and to determine the salient points and how one could go about preserving the main content of the article with short and simple sentences.

The difficulty then increases after we were more proficient on summarizing: we were then tasked to write a reader response essay on an article of our choice from a provided list. With sufficient summary practice, the first part of the reader response essay was extremely manageable, but the response to the article had a few hiccups for me. During the composition of the essay, I found myself staring into blank space and wondering what I should write about. This was easily resolved by referring to similar articles about the same issue online, and inspiration came and I managed to finish the reader response essay with little problems. During peer review, Aaron gave positive reviews about my essay and I was really happy about it. After some adjustments and corrections, I submitted the second draft, which received positive feedback along with suggestions for improvement. I was really happy as that meant that there are minimal issues with my essay and I could submit it with just some fine-tuning.

After the submission of the reader response essay, Ms. Anita gradually prepared us for the academic essay writing. Even though she has reduced the difficulty in essay crafting by guiding us on how to craft topic sentences, citation and paraphrasing, I felt that it was difficult to craft the essay. I had chosen income inequality in India, which is definitely something workable, but it was an uncommon choice as most of the classmates who were doing income inequality chose to do China or Singapore which are countries that people usually receive more information about. As a result, I had to search around on the internet on how serious the issue is, and also the relevant data to support my claims. My first draft was, in my opinion, close to a disaster: I had misunderstood the essay requirements and went ahead to state current and plausible future solutions for the secondary impact instead of stating for income inequality, and I had to re-do my essay. I was definitely disappointed as I had spent a lot of time and effort in crafting the essay but it did not turn out as expected. The second draft turned out much better, but lacked focus - a problem that I always faced when writing in general. Thanks to Ms. Anita's feedback, I was able to narrow my scope and phrase my ideas to be much clearer and more direct, and the third draft was submitted smoothly.

Now that ES1102 is coming to an end, I am extremely thankful of Ms. Anita as she has definitely made the module extremely manageable and not as burdensome and horrible as many have claimed. Also, she has helped me improve on my flaws in writing, and made me able to describe my ideas clearer and better. This skill will be practised when I am writing lab reports, as one is required to describe processes and analyses succinctly. However, this all will not happen if one is unwilling to practise. With sufficient practice and the willingness to improve, one can definitely succeed and attain whatever he wants - and in this case, completing homework assignments and then rewarding yourself with an hour of TV.

Signing off,

Lyon

Commentary on Essay

To be honest, I felt that I had chosen the wrong topic to work on when I was deciding on what inequality in which country should I write about. If time could reverse, I would have chosen to write about something much more manageable e.g. income inequality in China instead of income inequality in India.

My essay went off with a bad start: I had misunderstood the essay requirements and went happily typing away about the secondary impacts of income inequality, the solution to the secondary impacts and suggestions to improve the solutions. I was, in fact, tasked to write about the current solutions for income inequality and to provide any suggestions to income inequality. Head down, spirits low, I headed back home to re-do my essay.

My second draft turned out to be better: it addresses the requirements of the essay, but Ms. Anita remarked that my essay lacked focus, which was a major problem for me. I had always known that my writing goes haywire and my content goes everywhere from Sun to Pluto, but thankfully, Ms. Anita shared in her comments on how I can be direct on answering the essay and also be succinct on my points made. That showed me how I could focus on what I want to argue in my essay, and draft three was submitted with zero problems.

To conclude, this essay was definitely a difficult task for me as I had to redo my draft 1 even though I have spent a lot of time on it, but the effort paid off when I found out how I could focus my arguments and make it clear and direct. More importantly to me is how smoothly the submission of draft 3 went, as I thought that I would have to go through another re-writing to make it better. Thank goodness that the re-writing was unnecessary.

Signing off,

Lyon

Commentary on Reader Response Essay

During one of the weeks of the semester, we were required to write a reader response essay as part of the assessment requirements. My process of crafting the essay was relatively smooth: the summary practices provided my Ms. Anita beforehand really helped provide the groundwork on how to tackle the assignment, and her notes provided the general requirements on how one should write this essay. With the sufficient summary practices, writing a short paragraph in the first part of the reader response essay was relatively smooth sailing. 

The personal response to the article, however, proved to be of challenge: I faced problems trying to phrase my ideas to the academic style of writing, and at some points of time during the composition, I was at a loss as to what I should write. After searching for and reading up on articles that addressed similar issues as the one that I chose to write on, I managed to grasp some inspiration and I proceeded to compose the essay in a few hours. 

During peer review, I was really worried that my essay was badly-written, but surprisingly, Aaron (the really nice classmate who did peer review of my essay) liked it, and left a few compliments and some suggestions for improvement. I was definitely relieved. Polishing it up and uploading the second draft got a positive response from Ms. Anita as well. That was when I felt that things are really turning out better than I thought. Following Ms. Anita's comments, I fine-tuned some parts of the essay and then happily submitted it for grading. 

Looking back, it was definitely nice to see that the process of composing the reader response essay turned out pretty smooth, and the effort put in the summary practices definitely paid off. 

Signing off, 

Lyon 

My English Language Journey

Re-typing this post the fifth time has made me decide to split my English language journey into three parts: the Harry Potter phase, the music dictionary phase, and the book recommendation phase. 

When I was young, I always hated English because that was my weakest subject. It was during Primary 1 when my mum forced me to read Harry Potter, and I sincerely thank her for making me read it (the love for Harry Potter never stopped even though the series ended).

During my secondary school days, I had to study on a specific Classical music composer, and there was a music dictionary providing tonnes of information, but it also came with 1001 bombastic and unnecessary vocabulary that appeared in seven out of ten words. It was definitely ironic trying to understand a dictionary using another dictionary.

Many years after the music dictionary period, a friend recommended me tons of books for leisure, but there was one book which struck me extremely emotionally: Nicole Krauss' "The History of Love". Never had I read such a book described in such simple words and yet so touching for me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's reads (Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude) were extremely interesting reads to me as well, but nothing struck me as hard as "The History of Love".

Looking back, it was a pretty funny series of events that led my journey to where I am right now - from such arduous hate to something that I can appreciate and actually like, with mum being the little catalyst that brought down the barrier between me and the appreciation of English. Had not for her intervention in my learning, I would probably still hate English, but what's worse would be the forgoing of such fantastic books which have fueled my imagination (and vocabulary from the horrible music dictionaries) and shaping my thoughts and feelings. I strongly believe that the genre of books that you read shapes your perception of the world: it has definitely made me feel optimistic and hopeful for the future, and that was what kept me going on during the hard times. Albeit fictional, we all definitely can learn something from the characters and apply it to ourselves. To end this post, allow me to share a beautiful part of "The History of Love" with you: 

“Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered, and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword, a pebble could be a diamond, a tree, a castle. Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a house across the field, from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was queen and he was king. In the autumn light her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls, and when the sky grew dark, and they parted with leaves in their hair.

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.” 
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

Signing off, 

Lyon

(21/1/16) 

Me, Myself and I

About Me 

Hey all to the people reading this! My name is Lyon and I am majoring in Chemistry. I am 24 (not 21) as I took two gap years trying to pursue a music degree in Germany but failed, and hence I'm here, doing Chemistry as my back-up plan. Here's some information about myself: 

Favourite food: 
Chocolates, red wine, ramen, sushi, and most importantly CHICKEN RICE. I never knew where the love for chicken rice came from, but I can never reject a good plate of chicken rice (especially the one at Ghim Moh Food Centre) 

Favourite music:
Coldplay, Rachael Yamagata, Bjork and the usual top hits. I can replay the same song so many times that people would have gotten sick of it but I won't. Current record: Worn Me Down by Rachael Yamagata on repeat for one week long. 

Favourite Pastime: 
Playing emulation games on my computer. Nothing beats replaying those awesome games that I have played during childhood over and over again because the story line is just too good. 

I could probably go on forever, so I will just stop here. Thank you guys for spending your time to read this and good day to you all! 

Signing off, 

Lyon 
(21/1/2016)