Difficulties in writing in university classes

First of all, I have not encountered many difficulties in class due to the essence of engineering study which does not require too much article writing. However, I do have certain assignments and reports which requires certain skills of writing. The most noticeable example would be the design assignment I have done in this semester where we have decided to style the report in a product proposal form.

When I was writing the product proposal, I paid careful attention to my mistakes in grammar usage as I am conscious that such mistakes would give a terrible impression to the upper managements or the customers if this is a real life scenario. After I finished each sentence, I would read the sentence again once or twice to check for its structure or grammar. However, that does not warrant that I would make no mistakes at all in the proposal. Thus, I have my group member check my part of my part of the proposal while I check his to correct any error whether in content, or language usage. This cross checking process proved to be useful as I could learn a lot from others mistakes and it could help minimize the errors in our proposal.

I have interests in novels such as thrillers and mysteries so I have put in some of my time into reading and this have gradually improve my sentence structure in writing as I am exposed to more and more different styles. This would certainly come in handy when I am required to do any assignment involving writing in it as I could have more varieties of structure rather than just repeating and inducing boredom. However, the piles of work on the table have been preventing me from reading much these days but I certainly hope that I could start reading more again soon in the holiday. I believe that reading is crucial in improving language mastery as it would improve my vocabularies, sentence structures, sentence styles and many more. Of course, I would also agree entirely if one says that speaking in a certain language more often would greatly improve its mastery.

Grammar mistakes

Mistakes are inevitable in everything we do. After I have gone through the process of writing the two writing assignment, the various text editing practices and the two graded tests, I could roughly identify some of the weak point of my grammar mastering. First of all, I found that I have trouble identifying grammar errors from the text editing practice articles or test articles in the first place. This does not mean that I do not understand the grammar error or how to correct it but instead; this hinted me that I should and must read the article more carefully in the future. Through the practices and tests, I have found out many errors which I might not have spotted in the first place and this would help me greatly as I would remember them as examples and try my best to spot the errors of the same pattern.

Other then error spotting, I make mistakes sometimes with the need to use base form after certain words such as modals, gerunds or infinitives. Examples would be after the words "could", "does" or "would". I used to have problems with the usage of has, have, had words as I am uncertain when to use the word had. I have a better understanding now after the lecture on that particular topic. Example is that the word "had" should be used when an event happens before another event mentioned in the same sentence. Another simple example would be "I had my breakfast" where it indicates that the event has already taken place and over already.