Academic Writing_Handorfer

In my opinion I have a good level of spoken and written English. Nevertheless, there are several areas for improvement. First of all, the comma usage in English is kind of an enigma to me. Even if most people do not really care about the right punctuation I am of the opinion that especially for academic papers one should be capable to use the right punctuation. Furthermore, my writing style and my sentence structure seem to have also further potential for improvement. All too often, I get the feedback from native speakers that my writing style is typically for German speakers. Obviously, I use too complicated and uncommon sentence structures to express myself.  It would be great getting the opportunity to improve that aspect. I do not think that I have specific fears in academic writing. The only issue which causes every time troubles for me is getting things organized and to develop a logical order in my papers. It happened to me in the past that my papers were well researched but the structure was sometimes confusing for the reader. A further goal for this course is to get a bit more organized in the preparation and idea development phase. I am so glad that I can attend this course  as I want to start writing my Master Thesis within this semester. Due to my Bachelor's Degree taught in English I feel confident to read academic papers and to hold presentations in English.

Learning a language is in the total beginning more motivating as one can see the fast progress in his/her language skills. Nevertheless, after reaching a certain level of English it is hard to further improve for example writing style and sentence structure. Even if I have the impression that all of us can express ourselves pretty well in written as well as in spoken English we should take the chance within this class to improve these aspects to differentiate us from other non-native English speakers.