How to improve the level of written English: practical advice and useful tools

In the modern world, a significant part of interactions between people occurs on the Internet, and very often in writing. So increasing the level of written English is an important task in practical training. I found some good material with a selection of useful tips and tools on this topic and adapted it a little.

The most important thing: you need to constantly practice

We are not talking about following the rule of 10 thousand hours - everyone knows that by itself it does not work. But you need to understand a simple idea - it is difficult to write to those who do not train. For example, why does it seem to us that a couple of centuries ago people owned a written language many times better than our contemporaries? In fact, they didn’t stand out on average, but many wrote all the time — for example, they kept diaries.
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It is clear that today it is quite difficult to find time to write expanded texts on a daily basis, but it is important to develop the habit of writing at least a little bit regularly. For example, set yourself a task every day to write three sentences in English. This may be a post on the social network or a thoughtful comment on the website of the news publication, it does not matter. The main thing is regularity.

Practice will help to cope with the so-called fear of a clean slate, when a person can not take the first step and generally begin to write. The more you write, the easier it will be to do in the right situation, and the better you will learn to express your thoughts.

Do not be shy to use the dictionary

Firstly, sometimes finding the right word is difficult in principle. Secondly, you can simply forget the correct meaning of a word or confuse it with another - in English there are problems with this because of the large number of homophones (words that sound very similar, but have completely different meanings).

If the sentence includes words that should not be there, it does not look very good. Readers can either not understand the text at all, or think that the author does not really understand the topic. To avoid such problems and speed up learning, it’s worth using not standard dictionaries like Google Translate, but smarter tools. For example, the Vocabulary.com service not only shows the meanings of words, but helps to expand vocabulary.



Explanations on Vocabulary.com

Here you can see not only all possible meanings, but the main one will be explained in simple language, as if you were at school and talking to a teacher. Also, the user has access to examples of the use of the word, and on the same page you can take a test for knowing the aspects of its use - all this together allows you to quickly memorize problem words.

Do not forget about the structure

There are a number of life hacking to increase the overall level of "readability" of the text. One of the most useful is to structure it at the paragraph level by analogy with whole texts. Here's how it works:

• Try to start paragraphs with a headline sentence . It contains the main idea of ​​the entire paragraph. You immediately tell the reader what this part of the text will be about, which allows you to capture his attention. A person does not have to scroll through the text, only to the middle of the paragraph to understand the main idea.
• Then there should be the main part . After you have announced what you are going to write about, you need to give more information, open a topic, for example, by including relevant links.
• Complete the thought with a separate sentence . Thought must have not only a beginning, but an end. Until you have completed one idea, you cannot switch to another — it will confuse readers. Highlight the completion of thought with a separate sentence.

It sounds easy, but in practice it is not so easy to isolate an idea from each paragraph and even stretch it by two or three. As a result, you will understand that a significant part of the text can not be written at all, because it does not express any thoughts. Thanks to the practice of this method, one can learn to write meaningful texts.

Recheck all

Another important stage in the creation of good texts and in the study of language is the independent search for mistakes. You can optimize and speed up this process with the help of specialized tools. One of them is the Textly.AI service. The system is looking for typos, grammar errors, punctuation, gives advice on improving the style of writing.

It works like this: the user either goes to the site and copies / inserts the text for checking into a special editor, or installs an extension for the browser. In the second case, the tool will check texts on the fly right on the site where they are written.



In this way, you can quickly “drive out” the text and drastically reduce the number of errors in it. If the system constantly points you to the same error, you will remember it with a higher probability, and you will not repeat it in the future.

Find yourself an editor

If you learn a language, then automated helpers alone are indispensable. You need a person, necessarily a native speaker, who will read what you have written and make recommendations. Such a proofreader will be able to evaluate, among other things, the recommendations issued by automated tools, as well as to say if they say that at all. There are several options for solving the problem of finding such a person:

• Fluent.express is a useful service for ordering proofreading. The text is viewed very quickly, there is a limited free version. Of the minuses - you can not discuss editing in real time.
• Upwork - yes, you can easily hire yourself a freelance editor who will constantly work with you and discuss your texts. A very effective way, because checking a small text with a real linguist-carrier of the dialect of English you need (UK / US, etc.) can cost only a couple of dollars, and each recommendation can be discussed in a chat.
• Lingbe - in general, this service focuses on the development of speaking skills, but you can also use it to improve writing skills. On this platform, users communicate with each other and practice in the language - no one bothers you to discuss, for example, a blog post you write.

Conclusion: do not try to save time

Writing a good text takes time. If you hurry, nothing good will come of it: typos, errors, incomprehensible phrases, that's what will be in your sentences. Writing one literate email can take a couple of hours, you have to admit it.

To get a good result, you can not skip steps to improve the text - from running it through the system of analyzing grammar, checking incomprehensible words with a dictionary, to reading by a person. Over time, each of these stages will reveal fewer errors. It only works this way.