Blog #6 difficulties of writing

I come from China which country has strict requirements with the qualities of writing. That situation even began with high school. As a result, I did so many exercises and practices that I have been able to write not only extremely specific essay but also poetic prose in Chinese. However, in the consideration of writing in English, there are still some aspects which are difficult for me and should be improved definitely. First of all, because of the limited vocabularies, phrases, sentences patterns, it is hard for me to paraphrase the sentences to avoid the repetition of the same words in an article. The second challenge is the organization of the article. Although having lots of training, when writing an article without adequate time and preparation, I used to thinking in the way of Chinese which will cause grammatical errors, but more importantly the chaos of organization will come up with it. Actually, before taking this class, I still have lots of problems with grammar. But after constant writing and editing, in my current article there are rarely faults of grammar. And I have grasped the correct usage of a variety of reporting verbs to prevent the entirely same words in an article.

In China, people give more focus on the writing skills rather than the academic norms involved with plagiarism. Therefore, I knew few concepts of academic misconduct even I was a senior student in a university. As a consequence of the inadequate concerns of academic misconduct, I just got a warning of using a professor’s critical essay to support my own idea in a dissertation without proper citation. Personally, the primary reason of this phenomenon is cultural differences. Specifically, different cultures have different specialized concepts of academic misconduct and different custom. Consequently, cultures do play an significant role in academic lives.