Critical Reflection: My Academic Writing

The ES1102 module has been a short but fulfilling one. Initially, this module sounds like a chore with series of essay writing. But after a few weeks of lessons, what I had expected to be monotonous and boring turns out to be pretty engaging.

The start of this module was a bit rough. The first assignment was to submit an essay to our blog. It was a horrible experience. After a long time of not getting in touch with essay writing, I was just barely able to complete the assignment. It took me half a day just to pen my thoughts into an essay.

However, as more samples and exercises were given, writing becomes easier. There were class discussions to help us generate and collate our ideas as well as class exercises that were segmented into smaller portions to help us understand better. I particularly like the exercise to compare academic and non-academic writing. This exercise not only provides an example to how we should phrase our ideas, but also highlighted potential mistakes that we might make. All these activities have helped me build the foundation to academic writing. In the later half of the module, I realized that ideas started flowing in naturally as I am writing an essay and writing is no longer as tedious as it used to be.

All in all, this module has taught me a lot about academic writing. The knowledge that I have gained will definitely be useful and I will continue to exercise what I have learnt here in my other modules. This module is indeed tedious but worthwhile, because the skills that I have learnt here is not only applicable to this module but also for my future.