Academic Writing

To be honest I have actually more fears than hopes about writing academically. This is manly due to the fact that I am not feeling confident in writing English. Besides that, writing academically is even not that easy if someone is writing it in his or her native language, but to write it in a second language correctly it is close to impossible –at least for me. What I have also learned during my academic career as a student is that every professor has a different view on how someone should write academically. Some professors are of the opinion that the useage of words and the sentence structure should be simple, others think that using as many technical terms and loanwords as possible reflects the level of academical knowledge. I personally prefer reading easily readable content and try therefore to write my papers the same way.

What I know about myself is that when it comes to writing papers itself, I can actually also be a good writer, but only if I like my topic and be passionat about it. Also when I am looking back on my gradings of my last academic works in English is that I always performed very good at the end. In Canada and Taiwan my avarage mark on my papers was a A-, which is for a none-native speaker not that bad. However, I do have to admit that I had what I called a “none-native speaker bonus” during my time abroad, because the professors did not care much about my English in the sence of speaking and writing correctly. In Austria I have experienced that professors are much more strict about that.

My major goal for this class is to become more secure in writing English in general and being able to write English in a more professional way. I guess it would be an unrealistic goal if I would say that I will become a real English academic writer after this term, but at least I want to see a signifficant improvement in my English writing skills. At the end of my first reflective piece I can say that I am really looking forward to this term and hope to get the most out of this class.