Explain your top tips for improving English writing skills.
By Minjung Beak, Eunji Seo, Jeongah Han, Jungeun Sin and Seungug Lee(editor)
I believe improving English writing skill is the hardest job in terms of improving your English skills; reading, speaking and listening. Individually, those skills also the hardest job to me. Compared to other English abilities of me, I am lack of writing skill. When I do writing tasks, I am struggled with and felt overwhelmed. For this point, I started wondering how to work this problem out and way is the best to improve myself and which material is the most suitable to do this. I have asked these good questions to a number of English teachers and the answer is that memorizing valuable expressions, reading lots of books and practice.
First of all, memorizing some valuable expressions after reading a book is the best way to improve English skill. Since writing skills demand that writers make sentences, we need to know a lot of expressions. If we know and use lots of expressions from books in English, we can improve English writing skills. When I was high school students, my writing teacher told me that copy one paragraph everyday to improve writing skill. That was really effective. I suggest you to copy one paragraph written in English every day. It may be hard work but if you do it constantly, you can memorize many valuable expressions.
Now, guess. Why did English teachers advise to read the books in English? You already know that everybody’s writing style is different from others through reading books written in Korean. While reading books, you could obtain some useful phrases and idioms. Also you could learn something from the authors; how they continued the story, how they used synonyms suitably. Also published books already have been checked and edited through long time and effort, not always but there is almost no mistake. Therefore you could get much information from reading books.
Finally, the only thing left is practice. There is a proverb which says “practice makes perfect”. But you don’t need to think practice as difficult and boring work. Just enjoy writing. Diary, movie review, e-mail to friends and so on. Write anything and your writing skills will be improved. It will give you confidence that you can also write just like others. Actually, I have many chances to write in English in these days. At first, I felt that it’s very annoying and depressing but the more I write, the more I feel confident. I know that my English writing still contains many mistakes and sometimes it doesn’t make any sense but those will be fixed if I keep trying.
Most of the English learners are having a hard time in English writing. That’s not just because writing is difficult, but they are not used to writing in English. So even though I suggested some tips for you to improve your own writing skills, it’s the most important to write a lot by yourself and make yourself feel English writing as easy work. If you think about it affirmatively, there is nothing like English writing. The more you try, the more you achieve. It depends on you. Just keep trying with my three suggestions, and your skill must be improved. Good luck!
