English writing is not a big issue if most writing you have to do is work-related. Sending e-mails describing various issues and communicating with your colleagues and superiors is pretty straightforward and you don’t have to be creative to pull it off.
When it comes to writing something more specific – like doing college tests, writing letters or even a short story, things can get on top of you and you can suddenly start feeling as if you’re required to write in a certain way, but you just can’t delivered that writing style!
The key to successful English writing is as simple as it might sound a bit confusing to some – you have to speak first, and then write!
To write successfully in English you need to have a clearly formed thought in your head, and it’s not a surprise anymore that so far you haven’t been able to write good enough. When we think, we don’t have clearly formulated sentences floating in our minds. All we have is abstract concepts, flash-like notions and work-chunks. There’s not much to write if want to duplicate your mind’s content on paper!
You need to create meaningful English content even before you start writing something, and that simply means to speak first, and then put it down on paper. It may sound childish at first, but remember that your aim is to be effective and if you can achieve 100% improvement of your English writing skills, should you really care about how it’s achieved?
And here’s another factor why we, foreign English speakers, find it a bit more difficult to write in English. When we think, there’s much of our own language’s content in our minds. Speaking the words out helps us to create meaningful English sentences, simple as that!
When I write articles for my blog, I always speak during the process to help myself write the actual sentences. I’d come back later to correct mistakes, change words and proofread the article; in the first draft I don’t care so much about the article’s technical quality.
So when you create a piece of written English material, your task number one is to verbalize your thoughts into a sentence, and number two – put it down on a paper or a word processing software on a computer.
You don’t need to speak very loud; all you actually need to do is speak quietly at yourself so that you can focus your mind! You probably wouldn’t believe that such a simple technique would result in a radical English writing improvement; nonetheless, it works very well for those who’ve always perceived writing to be something special.
The reality is that you have to perceive English writing as a tangible form of spoken language and all of a sudden it will become much easier to produce a nice, easy-to-read piece of English text!
Guest post from English learning enthusiast Robby Kukurs. Robby writes about improving spoken English on his blog EnglishHarmony.com. He also regularly posts videos about improving English fluency on his YouTube channel.
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4 comments:
I might be wrong but isn´t there sometimes a big difference between spoken language and writing? there are so many formal aspects you have to consider writing an official text or something like that.
Yes, there is a difference between language used in official documentation and less formal texts like e-mails, reports, diary entries and similar. But still the difference is mostly in terms of vocabulary and even if you're writing a formal letter to your bank, for instance, you can imagine you having a conversation between you and the bank official and copy it onto your letter.
You see, I'm not saying you have to stuff formal documents with slang terms etc. My point is that if you're stuck in writing a particular piece of text, you have speak out loud and at least that can get you started.
And of course, you can edit and fix the text afterwards - that's something I'll be looking at in future articles about successful English writing!
Regards,
Robby
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