Okay so here we are, it is about time I start doing something on this website. Right now seems to be the perfect time, since I can hardly go outside and all of my contacts are virtual anyhow.
I took the advice of many websites into account and made my workspace downstairs at the dining table. For now this works well, people are not coming over to eat with me and I have a dedicated place in the house to do work and other spots to relax. Where it becomes hard, is that I am doing all kinds of things at my workplace, like follow an online course, write a blog, shop online and work. Every day of the week looks the same, so it is useless to have a weekend. As long as I can relax every once in a while it should be alright I guess. Let’s see how it goes.
Before I left for South Africa, I already subscribed in an EdX course. I thought it to be a good idea to start working on skills, especially skills which are useful for my future plans.
The online course I am taking focusses on Academic and Business Writing. For the online course, I am asked to keep a journal, which can be done on a public blog as well. My goal to be reached at the end of the course is to improve my academic writing, or at least dust it off. My masters thesis was published in 2008, so I need to find out where I am regarding writing skills. Besides knowing where I am, I also want to improve my academic writing skills for I am about to start a PhD research project. The ideas are usually in my head and make sense, but writing it down as such is much more complicated. To write an interesting story to read I am interested to also learn about writing blogs or articles, for fun reading and slightly journalistically 🤨.
Right now I mostly do business writing, though I also write policy documents for the government. In my organisation we write review reports and I tyically write a note or memorandum for our board about the procedure. I am on the brim of starting a review report, which looks back on the project I supervised in 2019. This is going to be in the Dutch language though. When I worked at the university I also wrote reports containing an analysis of the activities and results. Both jobs also require me to write proposals.
The relationship I have with writing is a bit complicated. Once I have completed something, I can be really proud of myself for writing useful stuff. The difficulty is that I am rather insecure about my writing and usually there is a lot that can be improved. I remember once writing something and when reading it again, I did not understand my own text anymore and had no idea why I wrote such an awful piece of work. In my imagination words come easily as thought do and everything makes sense that I write down. Let me change that into confident writing, which is what the course is about for me personally.
