Practice makes perfect.

Guilty as charged :P So I haven't been praticing writing as often as I should (or have initially intended when setting up this blog). Now I have another report to write for the graduate/masters class (advanced HCI) and the submitted reports are going to be shared among all students in the class. Being the only PhD student in the class, though just 5 months into my PhD (gosh-- that's almost half a year already!) would mean there's also the pressure of having to perform better than other students in the class who're doing their masters and (especially) undergraduates doing their honours. I have been to some good courses provided by the university's library (on writing proposals, literature review and citations) which do help but I still need to work on my writing, based on the last interim report I did for this very same course (I did talk a bit about it on my previous entry). It took such a painfully long time for me to write it! An obvious tip I found on the internet on writing good papers was:

"Write daily for at least 15 to 30 minutes, ideally two hours. Studies show this is the key to becoming a profilic writer" (Lemire, 2006).

He got lots of other useful tips for writing research papers in that link too. But soon after I read that particular sentence I opened up this blog and start writing this post :) Another thing that I should put into practice is the use of Active Voice in my writing. Reading this web article by Tina Blue makes me realize how much I have been using passive voice, when in actual I should strive for at least 95% use of active voice in my writing!

I should continue writing this post since it's not up to 15 minutes yet, but I do have the assignment to catch up with (due this friday along with the undergrad class test.. ugh!). And I know I'm cheating because again, what I'm writing here is a bit informal as opposed to the idea of practicing to write for the sake of better academic writing. But at least it gets me to organize my train of thoughts in English, which improves the flow of expressing ideas without having to translate them back and forth from Bahasa Melayu to English. So that's that. :)

*count how many of the word 'writing' I have used in this single post!