Critical Reflection

Throughout my journey in this course, I feel that my writing, reading and communication skills have improved significantly, even though there are still lots of room for improvements.

I started off with the lack of knowledge on how to write a summary of an article with proper citations. With an appropriate amount of guidance, coming out with a short paragraph of an article have become much easier. I feel that I did well in capturing the main ideas of the topic I did and summarize it within the word limits. However, I need to improve on my grammar and vocabulary skills because I often receive feedbacks from my peers and lecture that some of the sentences that I wrote sounds weird. I plan to work on my language skills by exposing myself to more reading and writing related activities.

In addition, public speaking has always been a challenge to me as I tend to stutter during presentation which led to difficulty in expressing my thoughts accurately. With sufficient research and preparation, I speak more confidently with lesser stutters because there was less reliance on notes and more eye contacts were made with my audience.

The oral and writing skills that I picked up in this module allow me to be more prepared for job interviews in the future. It is important to have good communication skills as it will ensure that individuals will higher chance of getting employed. Writing skills is plays a part too, it will be useful when I am writing an introductory letter.

During the process of writing technical report, there were many disagreements in our discussions as all of us had different approach in writing the report. This explains why we are always the slowest in terms of progress of the technical report. From this experience, I have learnt that conflicts can be reduced through proper planning and setting of common goals before drafting the technical report. With that, the team is more capable of producing good quality report in a lesser amount of time. This is applicable to me in the future when I enter the workforce because working with different people are inevitable, setting a common objective within the group of people I am working with will ensure that conflicts are reduced over the duration of the project. 

Writing the technical report have also taught me how to gather important information from an article that are relevant to our topic. In order not to exceed the word limits, it is important that the reports do not contain details that are irrelevant; all relevant contents gathered from different sources must be paraphrased and summarized. This learning process will ensure that I have a better understanding on how to write a research topic in the future.

In conclusion, I am glad that I had achieved the learning outcomes that I had set for myself on the first lesson. I strongly believe that this course has laid a strong foundation which can be beneficial for my future presentation and reports writing.