6 Habits That Will Improve Your Writing Skills!

If you're feeling stuck or overwhelmed with improving your writing skills or need help figuring out where to begin, this week's blog is for you! 

For non-native speakers, improving their academic writing can take time and effort. However, with the right strategies and mindset, you can significantly improve your writing and communicate your ideas effectively. 

Let's look at a few strategies to improve your writing skills immediately!

🔥 Read often. Reading is research-proven to expand your vocabulary. This habit is SO essential when looking to improve your writing skills, as well as your general English language skills. Even if you're not a fan of reading books, many other options exist. 

My top suggestions for building this habit are:

1. Read fiction or non-fiction books of your preference. 

2. Read blogs that interest you.

3. Read newspaper articles. 

4. Listen to a podcast, but follow along with the transcript of the podcast. (My suggestion is to print out the transcript) 

Whenever you sit down to read, try to find five new words you’re unfamiliar with. 

I recommend having a notebook or a dedicated page on your phone or computer for this activity. Once you've selected five new words, find their definition and search for 2-3 examples of that word used in a sentence. 

Then you should try to write your own sentences with these words and/or use them when speaking in English. 

This activity alone will help improve your writing by expanding your ideas and avoiding repetitiveness throughout your text. It will also help you become more fluent in your written and spoken skills. 

Important note: If you do not understand more than 25% of the text you're reading, this text is likely too difficult for your level. Find a text that you can understand but that’s challenging enough to present you with new vocabulary.

🔥 Subject-specific Vocabulary. If you’re studying or working in a specific field of study, reading in that subject area is encouraged to help you build subject-specific vocabulary. This will significantly improve the quality of your writing for academic essays, research papers, or field-specific job reports.

I would encourage you to repeat the same activity described above ☝🏼

🔥Use different sentence structures. 

It's important to learn how to use a variety of sentence structures. Download the Sentence Structures Cheat Sheet to review the different sentence types. 

However, you must learn to use these sentence structures correctly. Spend one week at a time focusing on mastering one sentence type and then move on to mastering the next sentence type. 

Another excellent way to practice sentence types is to find a random picture or a picture on your phone and write four different sentence types about the picture. Remember that the four sentence types are simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences, and compound-complex sentences. 

Take a look at my example below.

Simple sentence: Sabrina is visiting a castle in Ireland.

Compound sentence: Sabrina is at a castle, but the tour costs $100.

Complex sentence: Even though they had a car, the castles were far apart.

Compound-complex sentence: Even though they had a car, the castles were far apart, and Sabrina was not happy they hadn't stopped for lunch.

Be creative with your sentences!

🔥Write at length. Effective academic writing requires careful planning, drafting, revising, and proofreading. Practice breaking down your writing into manageable stages. Most importantly, practice writing at length. Start with writing well-crafted paragraphs and then move on to writing essays. 

Choose a different topic to write about each time you're going to write at length. Read a few articles, newspapers, or websites about a specific topic to gather some ideas, common points of view, and subject-specific vocabulary, and then write a paragraph about the topic and then move on to an essay. 

If you don't know what topics to write about… check out my Writing Topics for Practice PDF!

🔥Editing and Revisions. Learning to edit your work is highly important. However, in the beginning stages of building your writing skills, once you've completed your edits, I would highly recommend getting feedback from professors, an English tutor, an instructor, or native English-speaking peer. 

🔥MINDSET. You need to have a good mindset, like anything you hope to achieve or improve upon. You must be patient and show commitment to improve your language skills. Though sharing your work or limitations with others can be scary or intimidating, this is the only way to overcome our challenges and receive expert feedback. 

Ask yourself why improving your writing skills is important, and always keep your goals at the forefront of your language-learning journey! These moments require a little more motivation and reminders of where we want to go!

On that note, embrace the writing process, remain persistent, and remember that improvement comes with time and dedication!

Your English Writing Coach, 

Sabrina 😊