The importance of writing

Hello everyone,

This is a quick post about writing to remind you about its importance. 

In class we normally focus on speaking and listening because these are the skills you need the most. However, we cannot overlook the importance of writing.

You normally practise writing at home when you do the grammar activities, answer the reading comprehension questions or when you do a composition. In class we hardly ever write and, when we do, is normally very small things. For this reason you need to write more. You need to find opportunities to learn new things and revise the language you already know and writing is a good method.

Writing gives you a good opportunity to learn new words, revise the words you already know and expand your knowledge of them. Writing also helps you to practise grammar structures and patterns studied at the previous lessons. In addition, the more you practise the better you write. By practising writing your reading, listening and speaking skills also improve.

All the works you hand in are marked and corrected very accurately for you to learn from your mistakes, but sometimes you need to write just for the sake of writing and communicating and this is what you need to do more. It doesn't matter if you make mistakes, it doesn't matter if your text isn't perfect, the simple fact of writing will activate your knowledge and this will help you learn and fix the structures in your brain.

Try to find opportunities to write (and therefore learn):

1. Write your shopping list in English

2. Write your "To do list" in English

3. Text or whatsapp your friends in English

4. Write the comments in our Facebook group in English

5. Write comments to my blog entries (this is particularly useful because you always have a writing sample that you can copy so it's an excellent opportunity to revise the language we've seen in class)

Can you think of other ways of improving your writing?

Do you reckon you will start writing more in English from now on?