hello everyone welcome back to learn academic English I'm Jenna and on this channel I teach
intermediate and advanced level lessons for people who want to take their English to the
next level and I specifically focus on the kind of English that you will need to use in school
and work in today's lesson I'm going to teach you eight ways to improve your writing and you
can learn these ways quickly so that you can take your writing up a level as quickly as possible
before we get into that I would like to remind you to please give this video a like leave a comment
and subscribe if you want more lessons like this one and note that I offer memberships here on my
YouTube Channel please check it out if you would like weekly lessons and more connection with me
to do that simply visit my YouTube channel and click the join button so the first way that you
can improve your writing is to understand the structure of sentences and this will
allow you to avoid mistakes run-ons comma splices and fragments so one of the first things that we
teach our students at the place where I teach English is to make clear sentences in English
this is the structure or the foundation of good writing and that means that you need to understand
what a subject is what a verb is how to put those together to make clear English sentences and what
different types of sentences are you need to know what a simple sentence is a compound sentence and
a complex sentence and if you're not sure about that I will link a video above about Clauses and
sentences so again you just need to know how to write a clear sentence and to avoid these common
mistakes these are mistakes that are often made by native speakers of English but they are a mistakes
that are considered bad writing form and if you can write clear sentences people will recognize
that instantly number two learn how to use good transitions correctly so when we are writing we
usually use more formal words and these words are super important for connecting your ideas these
words show the reader what your ideas are and how they connect to each other they can show things
like similarity difference cause effect Etc some common transitions are in addition also however
therefore as a result for instance for example in my opinion in my experience and according to
most of those transitions can be used at the beginning of a sentence with a comma after so
it's super easy to start using them and as I mentioned before they help the reader to
understand the connections between your ideas in addition transitions show a certain level of
proficiency and fluency that allows your reader to feel that your English is at a higher level
number three learn the rules of commas it is extremely common for people to make mistakes
in commas but the rules are not that difficult I will link a video above that has all the rules of
commas that you need to begin writing well commas are one of the most important things that we use
to connect our ideas and it's important for us to know the rules so that we can use them confidently
and correctly number four clear verb tenses this is one of the most common mistakes that I see in
my students writing basically what happens is that I'm reading my students writing and I understand
the time maybe they are telling a story about something that happened when they were a child
and then suddenly the verb tenses change to the present tense there's no more past tense marker
on the verb and I feel confused what happened is the story in the past over and then I have to stop
I have to read it again and try to understand what's happening this is a problem because the
reader should never have to read your writing over and over to try to understand the meaning usually
what happens is that the student begins writing in the past and then slips up and forgets and begins
using the base form of the verb but it is very important to use verb tenses clearly so that the
reader understands the time that you are talking about and clearly understands your message one tip
for this is to use plenty of time markers so that the time of your story is clear use phrases like
last year or before that after that five years ago nowadays Etc and then when you are finished
writing go back and read your writing over again and look only for the verb tenses make sure that
your verb tenses are clear and consistent and if you change from one verb tense to another
try to make sure that that change is clear to the reader you might need to add a time marker
to indicate that change number five number five is to learn the pro pros and cons and how to use
writing programs that can help you so I'm going to say that I think that people should not be using
any of these writing programs the writing programs I'm talking about are things like Google translate
grammarly or the worst one of all for writing chat GPT or other AI programs the reason that I say
that people should not use them is that it becomes a tool that you then rely on and you can lose
confidence in yourself if you can learn to rely on the grammar and vocabulary that you already
have in your brain then every time that you have to write something you're going to feel confident
and know that you can do it however if you rely on a program that will maybe help you then you're not
going to know how much writing you can actually do by yourself and when you have something that you
have to write you're going to always be looking to that program to help you second these writing
programs have disadvantages as well Google translate will often give excessively formal
or even incorrect information grammarly is a great program but I think that if you can improve your
English you're not going to need it and chat GPT is a serious problem because it often contradicts
itself or it uses information that might even be wrong so it's a better idea for you just to
believe in yourself and use your brain to do your writing number six make sure that you understand
the style that is expected in English especially in the United States the style of writing is
typically more direct what does that mean that means that we usually State our main idea and
then we clearly State the ideas that support that main idea it's very direct instead of going around
and around and around that also means that the writing is typically more concise we try to take
out unnecessary words we try to make our writing as short as possible to express the idea clearly
and we don't usually repeat ideas over and over one way to learn about the style is to read
examples of writing to help you see how the style of writing in English might be different from
the style of writing in your first language and finally you need to know what style is expected as
far as formality goes if you're writing for school you're going to need to use more formal language
number seven if you're writing for school there are many things that you need to learn but the
three most important ones are how to write a thesis statement and I'll link a video above
that explains exactly how to do that the thesis statement is the most important sentence in your
essay so it's very important that you know how to do it number two how to brainstorm brainstorming
is a way that we use to get ideas before we write and it is so important to brainstorm well so that
you can then organize your ideas and that leads me to the third Point here for organization make
sure that you learn the organization of ideas that is expected in school writing the type of
writing that we do for school typically follows a predictable formula with an
introduction body paragraphs and a conclusion and the body paragraphs typically start with a
top topic sentence that tells the main idea of that paragraph and then has two to three
supporting ideas to support that topic sentence and inside that we include details and examples
to explain those supporting ideas that's a lot of information for you to learn right now but
if you are not familiar with essay structure and you need to use English for school it's really
important for you to start learning exactly how we write essays especially how to write a thesis
statement brainstorm ideas well and organize your ideas clearly and finally number eight if
you are writing for work you need to know how to adjust your language to fit the situation
if you are writing to a superior you need to make sure that you use plenty of polite language
so that that person does not get offended by what might be seen as a bossy or pushy tone
if you are writing to co-workers or people who work for you and you need to ask them
to do something you'll need to use more direct yet polite language in order for you to get the
results that you're looking for and again it's important to see examples so look for examples
of what work emails or memos might look like and be sure to use formal language that fits
the situation so I hope these eight tips will help you to learn how to improve your writing
each of them could be explained in their own video I will leave links to plenty of related
videos in the description box below so that you can learn more about most of these topics and
let me know in the comments below which of these tips you plan to use to improve your writing and
be sure to let me know if you have questions I hope to see you back here again soon take care