How to Improve Your English Writing Skills
We all realize that in today’s world, it is very important
to have good command of the English language. While we all focus on speaking
well, we often neglect the writing bit, and that many a times hampers our work
and even day to day correspondence.
Creativity cannot be infused into someone, but we can always
acquaint ourselves with some important tips that can help improve the way we
write. Here are some quick but effective pointers for those who wish to be able
to write better -
- Read – Get into the habit of reading. Do not restrict yourself to history, politics, fiction or science. Read a variety of subjects by various writers. That will help you in improving your sentence structure and style of writing.
- Art & Vocabulary – Reading always makes you richer by many words. While reading a book, keep a dictionary handy. As soon as you come across a word/phrase you do not understand, look it up. Use similes, metaphors and interesting phrases.
- Tenses – Focus on these basics. Get your tenses in order. Make a tense chart and practice.
- Grammar - Understand the sentence structure and parts of speech like noun, pronoun, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions. Make a chart with parts of speech and example words in front of them. Try and use them in your day to day conversation. Then get into a habit of using them in your writing.
- Sentence – A sentence has two components – Subject and Predicate. The subject is the Noun/Pronoun and predicate is the verb and the parts of the sentence that modify it. Always keep in mind that the subject and the verb should always “agree”. They should either be singular or plural.
- Write in active form.
- Always write in complete sentences.
- Take care of spelling, capitalization, punctuation.
- While writing, try to choose different topics and different styles of writing like essays, passages, stories, poems.
- It would be a good idea to maintain a journal of sorts, wherein entries are in different forms. Sometimes in a report sort of way, sometimes in a story format.
Try these tips and like I said earlier, read a lot. A
voracious reader is seldom out of ideas and words!
