Writing is a hard skill besides Speaking. Most students find it extremely hard to improve their Writing skills, especially to face English proficiency tests such as Duolingo English Test, IELTS, TOEFL, or PTE. If you are seeking a unique strategy to help you improve your writing day after day, then this is your place.
Practice makes everything perfect, and English writing skill is no exception. Basically, we will guide English learners on how to practice every day and utilise all tools available to get the most out of our effort.
Get yourself ready and explore this unique strategy!
Step 1: Read, Read, and Read
Sounds strange? Why Reading helps us improve our Writing? Let’s hear our ideas out first.
When we read, we know how words and ideas are organised and structured, and how linking words are used, so we are able to learn from them and apply them to our practice. Besides, we can learn lots of new words, idioms, collocations, and so on. In this case, we can also apply these new words to our writing, which surely helps us achieve higher writing scores through a variety of words used.
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On top of that, reading articles greatly helps us know how to form stronger theoretical points to reinforce our ideas. What we need to know is simply to pay close attention to the detail, read and learn from them. All in all, everything we read that we can apply to our Writing.
To check how to improve your Reading skill, this article is written just for you!
Step 2: Practice writing every day
Perhaps we don’t need to explain why you should do it, do we? How can we improve our Writing skills if we don’t put the effort into practicing every day?
Here are three ways that we want to share.
Chat with your friends: It’s simple! Instead of texting your friends in your mother tongue, let’s do it in English. It’s always super hard to do something new in the beginning, but we will all get used to it for sure. While texting, we may learn new words from our friends and improve our writing speed.
Do journaling: Some English learners are not used to journaling even in their mother tongue. Thus, it’s much harder to do it in English. Nonetheless, journaling is killing two birds with one stone. First and foremost, journaling is truly helpful in reviewing our whole day to see what we have done great and what still needed to be improved, so we’re able to learn from our mistakes, adjust our attitude and improve them. Secondly, we can use this opportunity to practice Writing and learn new words. For example, one day we experience something and we don’t know how to write them down in English, for sure we need to do research about these things. Journaling is easy, we simply need to write down our thoughts and feelings to understand them clearly. If English learners aim to take the IELTS paper version, they should do journaling on paper. But if they want to take the Duolingo English Test, it’s best to write it down on computers because DET is a 100% computer-based test.
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Write about particular topics: This is the best way to improve our Writing. In effect, it’s much more than practicing Writing skills. When we practice writing about particular topics, we should take it as a real task in a certified exam such as the IELTS, TOEFL, PTE, or DET. By doing so, we are able to utilise our skillset to BRAINSTORM ideas, ORGANISE thoughts, and EXPRESS our opinions clearly and coherently. To get the most out of this practicing method, English learners should set a timer exactly the same as certified tests. For example, IELTS takers are supposed to use 40 minutes to complete their Writing Task 2. So we strongly recommend that English learners should set a timer of 40 minutes to write at least 250 words as the task requires.
There are millions of questions about dozens of topics available, English learners only need to search for them on Google. Once we get our question about a specific topic, it’s better to read an article about that topic before writing, which is truly helpful in providing more information to us for a better and more thorough answer. To illustrate, if we find this question, “Some believe that history has little to teach us about today while others think that the study of the past helps us to understand the present. Discuss both views and give your own opinion.” We may search for something like, “Can history helps us improve our current lives?”.
Step 3: Review your work
In “Chat with your friends”, never forget to ask your friends for feedback if they see some misspelling, which will be beneficial to avoid similar mistakes in the future.
Regarding “Do journaling”, we need to spend time reviewing our work before completing it. After finishing our daily journaling, we should spend a couple of minutes reviewing our journal to see if there are spelling or grammar mistakes, or to replace an unwise sentence with a better one perhaps. It’s impossible to improve our Writing if there are lots of mistakes and we don’t know their existence.
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When it comes to “Write about particular topics”, we need to use our time in that 40 minutes for Task 2 IELTS Writing (or 05 minutes for Read then Write in the DET) to double-check our answers and correct mistakes. Grammar Accuracy is one of the grading elements in all English proficiency tests, so we will be penalised scores if there are spelling or grammar mistakes. Therefore, always remember to take a small part of your given time to review everything before submitting your answers.
To improve your DET overall scores in general or Literacy and Production specifically (both Literacy and Production evaluate our Writing skills), we need to put effort into practicing for real. Feel free to take a look at this DET Practice Platform, Premium accounts offer the following benefits.
Thousands of practice questions;
> 200 Interactive Reading and Interactive Listening sets;
At least 15 Full DETs
Instant feedback for all question types;
An integrated dictionary;
Three vocab lists for Premium members;
Go to the DET Practice Platform, create your FREE accounts, and experience everything for FREE.
