Easy Habits that Improve your Writing Skills

Writing can be a challenge and a hard task for a lot of ESL learners. Many learners are reluctant to write and others may even hate doing the task of writing. As a matter of fact, none of us was born able to write! Writing is a skill that one can develop through practice. Writing is a tool for expressing your abstract thoughts into concrete words. Ideas, feelings, conflicts, memories; the good and bad in one’s life can all be spread out on blank sheets and turned into a piece of art. There are three writing strategies that if you manage to learn, they may help you discover the writer in you.

You may ask yourself why writing is difficult. There are many reasons and factors that make it difficult to write. For instance, brainstorming ideas, difficulty to form a text in the second language, lack of vocabulary, lack of knowledge about grammar rules, issues with spelling and probably previous negative feedback. But how to improve your writing and become eager to write?! Simply, writers write. You need to develop a daily habit of writing. Create a journal or a daybook to keep a record of your thoughts throughout the day. You can use a pen or a computer to write. Write about your feelings and experiences. Write about things you like or you don’t like. Write about your dreams and your goals. Write about your sorrows and regrets. Write about anything that interests you. In the beginning, this will seem difficult to do which is normal and a part of your learning process but then it will become easier. Remember, when you write daily, you practice fluency, writing skills and communication.

The key to mastering the habit of writing is consistency. You should commit yourself to writing every day for at least 10 minutes. Your first drafts of writing will look crabby and might have many mistakes, but that doesn’t matter. All you have to do is to keep writing.

Another way to help you improve your writing skills is finding some “mentor texts” online. A mentor text is any text that can be used as an example of good writing. Through these texts, you will see how writing is formed. How the writer expresses his/her ideas or opinion. For example, you want to write an email to request a leave. What you need is to

search online for some good examples of “request email samples” and then select one to use as a model to help you write your own email.

Publishing your writing online is another way to keep you engaged with writing. Select a short text from your journal or dailybook, edit the chosen story or text and review it. After that, post it on Facebook, Instagram or your own blog. You might think, what if my writing still has some mistakes. It is not a big deal. You will always find people who will give you some good feedback and support.

In short, implementing these strategies will help you develop a daily habit of writing which will lead to improving your writing skills. Over time, writing that you once thought of as a difficult task, would become the source of creativity and you may as well have fun doing it.