Portfolio 4: What difficulties do you have writing in your engineering classes? How do you resolve the difficulties? How will you continue to improve?

As a year-1 engineering student, the few writing tasks I have are the lab reports and a General Elective Module project report. These writings are significantly different from the writing I have done in my secondary school and junior college. My difficulty is I do not know how to organize this kind of writing.

The GEM module I take is GEK1514, "microelectronics revolution - from sand to integrated circuits". Last week, I did a project report with my friend on the topic “The emergence of ICs and the impacts on entertainment and the ways we communicate". We had an adequate number of points but we found it is hard to put them into the report. This is because some of the points did not agree with others. In the end, we decide to put our r thesis statements in the paragraph first. Then I sort the points to supporting details and counter-arguments. After that, it is slightly easier for us to write. However, we do not really find this is a good organisation because we do not have an overall approach to the topic. It is like sometimes we find ICs make our ways of communication better while sometimes not. Thus, in the end, it is hard for us to give a conclusion. In the introduction, we did not have a clear stand as well. Therefore, my problem with my current university writing is whether I need a clear stand. By the way, thanks for EG1471, now I can do APA style citation and it really helps me a lot in the report because we need to do reference for the report.

To overcome my problems I need to discuss with my lectures about the objectives o f the reports. Moreover, I can read science journals to learn how they approach the reports generally. I believe my EG1471 lectures also have a lot of ideas in organizing a report. Thus, I can consult them next time.