Critical Reflection

Throughout the whole course of this module, many aspects of academic writing have been covered. In particular, the topics on grammar, summary and the paraphrasing techniques are especially helpful in my development of English language used in academic writing, specifically in report writing. Apart from these, doing timely critical reflection is a good measure of my personal improvement and development in many aspects of my life.

Before this module, the biggest problem I encounter was not being able to extract the main idea from complex articles, especially scientific journals. This course has taught me a few summarizing strategies such as to distinguish the main idea from supporting ideas by looking out for topic sentences in most of the cases. In this way, I can better comprehend the idea of the articles to aid in my future research studies. Other than summarizing articles, the technique of paraphrasing authors’ ideas to incorporate their findings in my own research work is very important as well. This is because plagiarism is taken very seriously when writing reports to be approved for publishing. I used to be very rigid in paraphrasing by replacing the text word for word, which might end up tweaking the meaning of the original idea. In this course, I have learnt other more useful techniques such as changing the sentence structure or the order of the ideas. Along with these, it is also very important to take note of grammatical errors so as to make my writing more coherent. Pertaining to that, the problem of redundancy used to occur frequently in my writing. I have learnt to pay more attention to this error in order to make my ideas more concise.

By critically reflecting on my own development, including the aspect of academic writing, I will be able to keep my progress in check and continue to practise these techniques, which I believe would be very useful in my future research works.