Writing Strategies

 
Learn how to improve your writing. A few easy tips can already help you. Read our suggestions and, if possible, try to practise the various steps.

Suggestions for improving your writing skills

Before you write

  • Decide why you want to write and who your audience will be.
  • To decide on a topic: brainstorm ideas and organise them as a mind-map. Highlight important keywords. Think of links between the keywords and draw lines etc.
  • Decide on a concrete topic and gather your ideas together. Take notes.
  • Use a dictionary and look up important vocabulary and phrases.
  • If you feel that you do not know enough about your topic, then do some research and read more about it.
  • Texts in the foreign language can help you to find useful phrases and words for your topic.
  • Collect your ideas and research results and put them together into a possible outline.

While you are writing

  • Create a first draft using your collected ideas. It is not important yet that the spelling or grammar make sense.
  • Read your ideas. Then check whether those thoughts are what you really want to say.
  • If you don’t know how to continue, take a break and put your writing away for a while.
  • Return to your writing with fresh eyes. Maybe new ideas come to mind.
  • Edit your draft: move, remove or rewrite sections that you feel need correction.
  • Continue to write and edit until you feel that the result is your final draft.
  • Hand your writing to someone else for proofreading. Maybe they can give you some new ideas.

After writing

  • Review the suggestions of improvement given by your proofreader. Edit your draft again.
  • Proofread your final draft, check spelling and grammar as well as coherence of the contents.
  • Continue to edit until you feel that the result is your final piece.
 

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