English Writing Tips

Hello everyone and welcome to Your Educational Podcast, I am your host Dr. Anthony and today's podcast is titled "English Writing Tips".  The first thing I tell my students is to write about something they know about.  When you write about something familiar or something that you have a lot of information about writing comes easy.  Try not to write about something that requires a lot of research.  You don't want to be bogged down in research.  The main objective is to get as much experience and practice in writing as possible.  A very clear and simple essay is the best approach.  Eventually, you can work your way up into a more complicated form of writing.  Like everything else, you must use a step by step approach to learn and improve your skills.  Here are some points you should keep in mind.   The first thing you want to do before you start writing is to jot down an outline for your introduction, body and conclusion of your essay.  Your introduction should be able to catch the reader's attention. You can do this by having the first sentence of your essay as a question.  By asking an intriguing question at the beginning of your essay, the reader will be less likely to put down your essay.  Here are several things you should check before writing your final draft.   Capitals are sometimes easily omitted from many essays; remember to capitalize names of people, the days of the week, months, and holidays.  You should also capitalize names of countries, rivers, oceans, religions, and titles of movies and books.  Knowing how to properly use a comma can sometimes be difficult.  Try to remember that a comma is needed after conjunctive adverbs. The following are examples of conjunctive adverbs: meanwhile, therefore, finally, and however. Another useful tip that I use concerns numbers.  I usually write out the numbers from zero to twenty.  If the number is greater than twenty, I would normally just write it out in numerical form.   Do not write words that are unfamiliar to you for the sake of impressing your reader.  By taking this approach, you can make the mistake of using a word incorrectly and confuse your reader. Remember not to repeat the same sentence over and over again in your essay.  Using the same sentence repetitively in your essay creates boredom. Avoid creating incomplete sentences that are missing a subject or verb.  Another mistake young writers make is using abbreviations. Do not use abbreviations; chances are your readers will not understand it.   English writing can be fun and rewarding.  Like all things in this world, it takes time to develop good skills.  As your listening and reading skills improve, so will your writing skills.  A good approach to developing writing skills is to keep a diary of your activities.  Each day, you jot down several sentences of what happen at school or work. You can also write down what you plan on doing next week or next month.  Do you have a writing tip to share with us? If so, I would like to hear about it. I would like to say hi to all my students and friends around the world. Stay tune with us on Your Educational Podcast.....this is            Dr. Anthony....signing off