ESL Blogs

Finally, I can continue my second part of my blog post. In this blog post, I want to share my experience to develop my writing skill. Since there are various things that I do to improve my writing skill, I can't write them down in one article. It will be too long and boring.

So I divide them into 4 parts. Each part discusses one of four things that I do to improve my writing skill. On the first part, we discuss two grammar books that I recommend.



To remind you, here four simple things I do to improve my writing skill:

1.Choose good grammar books

2.Read and write English articles daily

3.Maximize tools that you have

4. Ask for correction



2. Read and write English articles daily

                                                   Picture source: gabriellesgiffords.blogspot.com

One day, I asked my American friend, "I want to be able to write as fluent as native English speaker. What should I do? Do you have any tips?"

And she answered me,"Read. Read a lot of story and articles. When you read a lot of story and articles, you can learn and use native English speakers' writing style."

Why should we read?

I think she was right. If we want to improve our writing skill, the first step is read. In my opinion, reading and writing in one unity. Just like listening and speaking. When we read a lot of stories and articles in English, we improve our vocabulary.

Reading English articles also can help us think in English since we adapt ourselves in how native English speakers think and construct their articles. The way they deliver their ideas when they are speaking or writing is different with the way we do it with our native language.

How do I read?

So, how do I manage to read English articles and stories? I just do a simple thing. I choose topics that I like and then read articles about that topics. For instance, I like to watch American TV Series. So, I'm searching articles that discuss them: interview, review, episode guides and spoilers. Since I'm interested in the topic, I feel enthusiasm to read them.

Every time I find words that I don't understand, I look definitions on dictionary. I usually never try to memorize those words. Why? Personally, because trying to memorize new words is boring for me. The good thing that I never realize is that I read articles in the same topic. So those articles use the same words. So I meet those new words again and again. And I remember them eventually.

But, don't get me wrong. I never say that I only read articles from one topic. I also read articles in other topics because there are various things that interesting for me.

Let's write

Reading English articles is like an input. While, writing in English is like an output. We can combine them. If you never been writing in English, you can start by doing exercises that are provided by English grammar books.

                                                                Picture's source:helloliefje.com

Try to play jumble sentences game. MyEC provides this kind of game. In this game, you need to arrange sentence in the right order. So, when you start to familiar with this game, you can improve your grammar. You start to know how to write an English sentence in the right structure.

You can also try to write two short paragraphs in your computer. Choose any topic that you want. And don't worry if what you write is grammatically correct or not. Just write. After that, you can use tool such grammar checker to check your writing.


When you start to be more confidence, you can expand the exercises. Try to read blog posts on My EC, and try to leave your comment. Don't worry about grammar and whether you write your comment in right way or not. I think it's a good start before you will try to write your blog post.

I will discuss some technical tips that I usually do in the third part of this blog post. I hope this part can give you some ideas to improve your reading skill.