Item 4

I feel it difficult in several aspects when writing in engineering classes. Firstly, the most difficult is the first step after having decided the topic, which is to determine the main direction of the whole essay. What is the content that is going to be included in the article? At first, I did know how to decide so that I kept thinking until an idea came to my mind accidentally. Obviously, this is not a smart way. It always wastes a lot of time. A nice way to solve this difficulty is brain storming which is writing down any idea that comes to my mind. This helps me continue to think and then gives me a chance to choose the best idea from the notes. In addition to this difficulty, I find it hard to choose exact vocabularies to express my opinions. I charged this upon my lack of vocabulary. Actually, that is not the exclusive reason. Reading widely can help to improve the ability of learning and using vocabularies. I also learned some vocabularies from the book Focusing on Vocabulary. However, knowing the meaning of these vocabularies does not mean knowing how to use these vocabularies. To learn to use them I should firstly remember their basic meanings so that when I meet them later in certain articles I recognize how to use it in certain situations. Lastly, I have difficulty in writing the conclusion of an essay. Generally, I copied down some sentences in the first paragraph and then paste them to the last paragraph. This is because I did not know how to rephrase sentences. If I could paraphrase these topic sentences in the last segment it would look better.