How to Be a Better Writer

 

Hi All, 

Writing is everywhere! In our homes, at work, at the stores and even on the street. The skill of writing is not like that of listening. Writing is an output skill that takes practice in order to improve. Let's take a look at some ways to help you improve this most vital part of our English life. 

1. Begin reading anything and everything. Even if you may not understand everything you are reading, you are still adding this information to your brain. Look at it this way. In order to build a house, one needs bricks. The more bricks you have, the bigger house you can build. Same with language; the more words you have. the more English you can speak and write, but you need the input of those words, and that comes from listening and reading. I promise you, if you never read, you will never write well. 
2. Start writing anything and everything. Shopping lists, letters, poems and just random notes. Don't hesitate. Just keep writing. Like a baby learning to walk. The baby stumbles and gets right back up without overthinking it, don't they? Your writing is the same way.  
3. Start copying a book by hand. Write the book out word by word, sentence by sentence in a notebook. Start with children's book at first if you like. (Any genre is really okay. If you want to practice regular conversation, choose a novel. If you want to better your academic writing, choose an academic textbook.) Now keep in mind, you will not finish this book in one day. This is a daily practice routine that will take time. Do this about 20 minutes a day. ................Now, let's examine some of the benefits for doing this practice method. 
1. This will help build vocabulary. Remember our building a house example?
2. This will help with learning to spell words. Some words sound alike but are totally different in spelling and writing the words out will help you to see the differences that you cannot see while only listening to English. 
3. This will help you to actually see grammar rules in play. You may not understand them, but you will start feeling them over time. 
4. This will help with learning pronoun usage in a natural way. Like for instance, may people call their boats and cars 'she'. Over time you will see how pronouns are used by native speakers. 
5. This will help with sentence structure; for example, how adjectives come before a noun. 
6. This will help you understand idea structure when telling a story. Again, the more you practice, the more your mind will start picking this up without you even realizing it. 
7. And you will subconsciously start understanding how paragraphs are formed. For example: topic sentence, supporting ideas, concluding sentences. 

All of these things will be worked on without you even realizing it when you begin copying the book over page by page. It forces you to slow down and intake all of this information with natural absorption. Isn't that incredible???? Try this method today and you can see for yourself. Choose your text to copy over, and just start. 

I did this method myself, many years ago. It was a great exercise, even for me---an English native speaker. It helped me understand forming ideas, and fixed my own issues with punctuations. It ultimately made me a better writer! And it can help you too, no matter your level of English; you can only improve!

For more fun English Doodles, don't forget to subscribe to English with Yasmine's YouTube channel here.