After 4 tests this week, I finally have some time to write a post on this blog, which I have been neglecting. The past recesses week had not been much of a break considering much of my time spent was at home studying, to various degress of effectiveness. But I guess this is the life of a university student and a necessary lesson to teach us how to manage time better.

This is week 7 into Sem 1 and I am glad to say that my initial impressions of SP1202 before the semester had not been wrong. This course had thought me how to appreciate the importance of the English language –the using and understanding of it – in the area of Science where it may not seem to have direct relevance at first thought. It is wonderful to still have the opportunity to have language classes even after enrolling in a Science course in university.

Some thoughts about writing the SUJA draft 1, which I have submitted to Turn it in two days ago. Personally, I found to areas particularly difficult and with which I have spent most time on. One area was the gathering of sources. I personally took almost half the time searching for sources and compiling them. Sometimes, it was necessary to read the whole article and probably only one idea was relevant, or only one sentence from the article was used and paraphrased in my article. The understanding of the authors’ stand and arguments took quite some time but I am glad I did. This, however, taught me the reality of most science research, where gathering of previous works and making sense of them typically takes more time than the actual writing of your article.

The other part I had difficulty on was in the paraphrasing of sentences and ideas and writing complex but grammatically correct sentences. Many times, I found myself re-reading my own sentences only to find that my ideas didn’t flow properly or it wasn’t correctly constructed. That took a lot of effort and I attribute that to my weakness in the English language itself. Given time, I would like to re-visit my basic grammar that I have learnt in primary school:)That aside, I think writing the SUJA had given me the practice that I need to brush up on my language ability. Also, I found that the skills taught in tutorials were also relevant during the writing of the SUJA and in the process, I could understand how to apply these skills better.

I look forward to the 2nd conference for improvements I can make to my 1st SUJA draft.