Academic Writing WS12

Hi, 

This is my first time starting a blog, so it might be a bit unstructered but i ask everyone to bear with me. As a first entry I would like to add my refelctive piece. 

I would consider my English capabilities as fairly well, concerning spoken as well as written language. The longest Paper I have written was in the English economics course,  detailing a small business we had to come up with. I also have written Lab protocols in English to familiarize myself with the terminology of chemistry in English.

My greatest capability lies in writing technologically correct and thorough statements. A main problem I face is the difference of academic writing style in German and English. With German as my native language I tend to build overly complex and boxed sentence structures which work well in German but utterly fail in English. I would like to increase the “pull” of my products, referring to the fact that my texts can get boring – at least I experience it that way.

A grave difference between academic writing in English and in German is that German texts are not easily understood most of the time, whereas English academic works are often much more fluent and very good to grasp and understand. It seems to me that people whose native language is English have a better capability of distilling information and rephrasing that information into something that can be understood more easily. The focus of the two languages seems to be different, where English is the one trying to bring a message across, whereas German seems to have the tendency to be more complex than what is needed to transport information.

The components of academic writing are all based on substantial background knowledge and on coherent trusted sources. An objective and fair viewpoint of the topic is also necessary. An academic paper should never try to persuade but it should always try to interest the reader in finding out more about the topic and the thoughts of the Author.