Viktoria_Academic Writing_S2012

I see myself as one of the few lucky ones who have already written several academic papers for university. Especially in the field of international management, writing papers with proper citation and sources is essential. The process of learning the proper way to cite and gather information was not easy, sometimes even painful but paid off in the end.

During my studies in Taiwan, I got to learn another type of “academic writing”. Sources such as Wikipedia, newspapers and even more unreliable sources were accepted and never questioned. I fear that this past experience set me back in my academic writing style or even made me lazy and doing it proper.  

One of the most imporation things I learned about writing in English – and writing in general – is to choose the topic carefully and narrow down the topic to a size one can handle in the given time. Time and workload are topics many students don’t pay enough attention to. In preparation of my diploma thesis, I have most fear to choose a too wide or even irrelevant research topic for my paper.  On the one hand I often feel that every topic of interest was studied by someone else before, on the other hand I feel it hard to find reliable and suitable information to specific topics.

For this class’s term paper, I decided not to write about any topic I have written and read about in the past. Although I find economics, business, culture and languages interesting, I want to take the chance to choose my topic from a completely different direction. This time, I will strictly let my interest speak and take the challenge to find sufficient information in a field I have never studies into depth.

From my overall writing style, I don’t expect too much correction, but I know that I lack in willingness to proofread and check the spelling over and over again J. Feedback on those shortcomings don’t seem very helpful to me, I prefer to get feedback on the topic and readability of my papers. I want people to find my paper interesting and also easy to understand for someone who is not familiar with the topic.

From this course I hope to improve my active vocabulary for writing academic papers. Papers that have ten or more pages often start to sound repetitive in their linking words and phrases. This may not be avoidable, but I will try to widen my word pool and set of phrases to don’t give my reader the feeling of a very limited variety.