Introduction: The Importance of Improving Your Writing
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If you spend time writing in English or want to make your writing a little more professional, I want to talk to you about some very useful tips that will help you improve your writing a lot. Indeed, it will help you to significantly improve your academic writing and develop these skills. And I know when I say academic writing, you might think of the university where a lot of academic writing is done, but that’s also very important in a more professional environment, a business environment.
So these tips will help. My name is Wes. The channel is interactive in English. It’s all about trying to help you improve your skills so you can reach your fluency goals. If this is what you would like to do, please register. Turn on notifications to find out about future lessons. So let’s start with the first tip I have for you. And I think this is very important, that’s why I put it at the beginning.
Be concise
And that’s to be brief. And what being concise means is that you state the information clearly and use as few words as possible. So really, you avoid wasting words. And I think that goes for so many different things. So let me give you an example, with these video lessons before, a long time ago, when I first started doing these lessons, I thought, the more I could do them, then that would make it better and more people would be watching them. But what I realized after I started doing this is that I shouldn’t try to do more lessons.
I will have to try to give you the information. I’ll have to try to teach you the lesson, and then whenever it’s over, then, well, that’s how long the lesson is. And this is the same with your writing. You should be concise, state the information and try to use as few words as possible. Because why say something in ten words when you could say it in five? And one way you can do this that will help you be concise is to use action verbs.
Organize your paper
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The next tip I have for you is to organize your paper. This will help you structure your writing carefully and all you need to do is create an outline. It is so simple. And I can’t stress that enough, because often I think a lot of people just skip that part of the writing process that I used to teach IELTS, and IELTS is a proficiency test, and part of the test you have to write and it’s timed. And I would work with students to help them strive to achieve a high grade.
And what I would always tell them is that in the beginning, just take five minutes, organize your work and write down. Create a brief outline of what you want to say before you start writing. And so, so often I was told, I don’t have time. There is no time for that. I just need to start writing. And when I read their writing, I could see the lack of organization. Some of the ideas would overlap and some points would not even connect to their main thesis.
Avoid informal language
My next tip is that you should avoid contractions, idioms and other colloquial expressions simply because they are very informal and written in general. Writing is more formal, and academic writing is certainly more formal. So let’s take a look at some informal languages like contractions. Instead of write is write is instead of write could have write could have or instead of write.
And in this case, instead of if you were to say as I tolerate, use a more specific verb like endure or tolerate. Instead of saying check out, you could use a verb like view or advise. So not only do you use more formal language, but you’re also more concise. Use fewer words. And as for idioms, just please avoid them See these two sentences here.
Change your sentence structures
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The next tip is that you should vary your sentence structures, and this will help you avoid rambling. And if you’re not sure what that means, I’ll tell you a little story and I think it will make more sense. But let’s go into a little more detail about sentence structure. So there are four basic sentence structures. You have simple suggestions. This is an independent clause. So if I’m going to tell you a story about my day, I might say that I woke up late this morning.
It’s a simple proposition. We also have compound sentences, which is when you have two or more independent sentences. So continuing the story, I could say that I immediately went to the kitchen and made myself a cup of coffee. A compound sentence is when you have an independent clause plus one or more dependent clauses. After finishing my coffee, I got ready for work.
Use Active Voice
That way, when you reread, you’ll be able to get a better feel if there’s any fuss and you need to adjust some of your sentence structures. My next tip is to use the active voice, and this is because the active voice just gives more clarity. Now I’m not, I’m not saying you should never use the passive voice. It really depends on what you’re writing.
If you are writing a scientific paper, then yes, you are likely to have some passive sentences, but in general, most of your sentences should be active. So let’s compare assets and liabilities. If I were to say that the archaeologists conducted a study of the newly discovered objects, that is an active proposition. It has nine words. And if we compare it with the passive, a study was carried out on the newly discovered objects.
Avoid Repetition
Try to use a variety of words because it will make your writing more captivating. Use precise language if possible and try to avoid words like too much because words like this are often overused. Now when writing one, one way to avoid repetition is when it comes to transition words. These transition words are when you can add information.
You may be jumping from one idea to another, but when you write transition words, it’s easy to repeat them. Let’s take the word as well. This is a word that is commonly used to add more information, but you don’t always have to use this word because there are other words that have the same meaning. So instead of saying that the crisis caused serious financial damage, companies were forced to downsize and many people lost their jobs.
Correct your work
The next tip, and I really want to stress this, is fixed. And the reason I say I want to emphasize this is because it’s another step in the writing process that some people tend to skip. And the reason why it’s so important to proofread is because you can do some of the things I’ve already talked about. You can get a feel for the sentence structure you are using.
You can spot some of the words you may have repeated. Most of you probably proofread because you want to fix mistakes. So in that case, I have a bonus tip for you that reads backwards. Go to the last sentence. Read this. Try to look for mistakes. Go to next to last sentence. Read this.
Conclusion
Look for mistakes and just keep reading backwards until you get to the beginning. And the reason for that is because you really isolate the sentence and you’re able to look for spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, punctuation. And in short, when you read backwards, you focus more on the text than on the ideas.
So proofread from start to finish if you want to get a feel for the pace and flow of your writing, make sure your ideas are logically organized, and check for repetition. Correct the reverse if you want to really focus on the text and check for grammatical errors. And most importantly, just make sure you proofread and don’t skip this step.