General Admissions & OTCAS How to improve writing skills

[Makingmoves2014]

Good Afternoon! I appreciate the constructive criticism but offer advice next time. I believe this will be the last time I post something on here. I'm aware that my writing skills is not the best but please offer any advice on how to improve my writing skills instead of just telling me. Thanks in advance.

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[Kidamnesiac]

Hey! Don't be discouraged! Just read, read, read, read, read. Read what interests you, but make sure that it is "accepted" as being a good book...stuff like Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Dostoevsky (one of my favorites)...read non-fiction (I just finished a great book called "The Shallows" which is very well written and describes the possible harm the internet causes to our brains)...read academic journals or magazines like the New Yorker or the Economist. No 50 Shades of Grey! I know that this sounds elitist, but it will help you to digest language that academics consider "good". Make reading like eating...do it daily! Make sure to write down words that you don't know, and look them up in a dictionary. Begin to use those words with others.

And also, write. Write on forums, blogs, letters to your family...anything to keep up that practice. Join a book club or discussion group to work on getting your ideas out in ways that make sense to other people. Trust me, all it takes is some practice...just like an instrument!

 

[trep]

Hey again, I was the one who commented on your other thread regarding improving your writing.

It is somewhat difficult for me to give you specific advice on improving your writing because writing has always been somewhat intuitive to me - things like proper comma usage and other punctuation has always inherently made sense to me if I simply go by my internal monologue (although I am by no means a perfect writer). That being said, as the aforementioned post suggested, I would also recommend reading scholarly articles and text books and taking a mental note of the author's sentence formation/structure. I admittedly have never been an avid reader myself, albeit I have read a reasonable amount of scholarly material as part of my curriculum.

Augmenting your vocabulary may help to some extent, although doing so might not be sufficient if you are poor at sentence structure and other more general aspects of writing. One idea might be to visit the writing lab at your college (I assume they have one as they are pretty standard at many colleges) and seek advice.

Honestly though, the best advice I could give you is to write as much as you can. Ask your professors or others who are fairly decent writers to check over your work and give you constructive feedback and then take note of their suggestions. Be perspicacious when reading articles and other scholarly material and try to emulate their writing style in your work (although obviously don't plagiarize).

When writing a generic essay, I always like to follow the inverted pyramid structure for my introduction. Start with a very broad statement introducing the topic and then narrow in focus, ending with your thesis statement in the last sentence (make sure your into briefly covers the major topics of discussion). From there, begin each paragraph with a statement that indicates what the purpose of the paragraph is and then elaborate on that by providing additional information and examples. Repeat this process for each paragraph in the body of your essay and then end with a conclusion that summarizes your previous points, going into the take-home points and implications.

Hopefully this helps. Keep working at it and you will inevitably improve.

P.S. be careful about subject and verb agreement - the verb must agree in tense and number with its antecedent. For example, in your post you said "I'm aware that my writing skills IS not the best..." In that sentence, "writing skills" is plural and therefore you should have said "ARE not the best" instead of "is" because the word "is" corresponds to a singular antecedent. However, had you said "my writing ability is not the best" then that would have been correct as "writing ability" is singular and so is the word "is".

 

[ExceptionalSea]

i agree with the others that reading as much as possible and taking in sentence structure, grammar, learning new vocabulary words, and seeing words spelled correctly on a daily basis will help your own writing improve tremendously. i also liked the suggestions of visiting your writing lab or practicing your writing and having someone look over it to give you constructive criticism.

although it is definitely helpful to read books from the literary cannon to expand your reading comprehension skills and vocabulary, i would say that if those authors or books don't interest you and you can't keep yourself interested, don't read them. there are plenty of well-written contemporary books that you can read that will still help you improve your writing skills merely by helping you see good sentence structure and grammar and give you practice with the fluidity of the written word. i would say reading anything, be it john grisham or marie claire (actually has some decent articles for the type of magazine it is!) or harry potter, etc. will help you. and it will be that much better if you are actually interested in reading it and understanding it!

 

[Makingmoves2014]

i agree with the others that reading as much as possible and taking in sentence structure, grammar, learning new vocabulary words, and seeing words spelled correctly on a daily basis will help your own writing improve tremendously. i also liked the suggestions of visiting your writing lab or practicing your writing and having someone look over it to give you constructive criticism.

although it is definitely helpful to read books from the literary cannon to expand your reading comprehension skills and vocabulary, i would say that if those authors or books don't interest you and you can't keep yourself interested, don't read them. there are plenty of well-written contemporary books that you can read that will still help you improve your writing skills merely by helping you see good sentence structure and grammar and give you practice with the fluidity of the written word. i would say reading anything, be it john grisham or marie claire (actually has some decent articles for the type of magazine it is!) or harry potter, etc. will help you. and it will be that much better if you are actually interested in reading it and understanding it!

So reading anything will help? I feel like if I read something that I'm not interested in then I will stop reading…I like mystery books, comedy books, and books like 50 shades of gray...

 

[trep]

So reading anything will help? I feel like if I read something that I'm not interested in then I will stop reading…I like mystery books, comedy books, and books like 50 shades of gray...

Well, in theory yes, provided that it is of a relatively sophisticated level. What are your academic interests? For example, if you enjoy Psychology then try to read some journal articles or literature reviews on topics or theories that captivate your interest. It would be best to read scholarly material as the use of language is typically of a greater caliber than many fiction books (albeit not exclusively). I'm not familiar with the type of reading material you mentioned though, so it's hard to say.

Another idea for reading material would be news articles that are found on websites such as nytimes, scientific american, forbes, the new yorker, wall street journal, etc. Basically anything that would be considered "college level" material.

 

[Kidamnesiac]

You should read things that interest you, but they need to have what academics would consider good diction and vocabulary (or else you won't grow as an academic writer). If you like 50 shades, try reading Oscar Wilde. If you like mysteries, try Arthur Conan Doyle. If you like comedy, try David Foster Wallace. Also, check out Cormac McCarthy, David Mitchell, Phillip Roth, or Jonathon Franzen. I agree that it doesn't have to be a "classic" to be good writing, but trust me: you will learn more GRE vocab from reading 19th century literature than from reading 20th century literature. And don't assume that the older stuff is boring or too hard to read...there's a reason they're called classics!

 

[trep]

you will learn more GRE vocab from reading 19th century literature than from reading 20th century literature. !

I totally agree with this. Although it isn't quite from the 19th century, I recently read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1939) and from the inception it was conspicuously abundant in GRE vocabulary words.