Isabel Martínez Puche (Week 1)

 HOW DO I IMPROVE MY WRITING

There are many ways to improve one’s writing. In my case, I consider that one of the main bases to obtain a well-written text is vocabulary. It provides a lot of information and it is necessary to be familiar with the vocabulary of the context you are going to write about. That’s why I try to learn as much vocabulary as possible through different ways. For example, by reading books of a wide range of genres.   It also helps you to get in contact with the structures of the English language, which are important to take into account, as you observe the different techniques used by author’s. It gives you the opportunity to choose between more than one possibility or to use some of them at the same time and make your text richer in terms of structure and writing techniques. All of this with the help of a dictionary. Whether it is online or a physical one, it is important to have a dictionary to search for the meaning of the new vocabulary that may appear through your reading. It is recommendable as well to write down all of those words and expressions you didn’t know and also to try to include them in your writings. This way, you can memorize them easily and learn which is the better context to use them properly.

Apart from reading, another way of improve your writing is to write. By including new vocabulary and structures, your writing will keep improving each time. Later on, you can compare your previews writings with the most recent ones and point out the areas where you improved and those that need more improvement.

The dictionaries I usually use when I’m reading are http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ where the meaning is explained in English and http://www.wordreference.com/ for those times when I don’t fully understand the English explanation and I need to translate it into Spanish.