A good tip to improve your English writing: Try to write for ten minutes a day
Two of the most common questions that we are asked during our academic writing workshops are ‘how can I be more productive in English?’, and ‘how can I improve my English writing?’. At Charlesworth Author Services we know well that writing and publishing in a second (or third, or fourth) language is extremely challenging. We are here to help.
How can you improve your English writing? Here are two top tips:
• Try to think in English when writing (rather than your native language), and;
• Try to write for a short time each day to practice.
Write down your thoughts in English in the same way that they come into your head. One of the best tips for being effective and for your work to flow is to write in the same way as you think; you can always edit later. This will also help you to overcome ‘writer’s block’, that feeling of just not being able to get anything done. It’s very common for people to just get overwhelmed at the thought of having to write something in any language, but practising little and often makes perfect, as they say.
Try to write for just ten minutes each day. If you find yourself making time in your schedule for academic writing, perhaps to make a start on a paper or abstract, and then filling that time with everything BUT writing, you are not alone. Here is a new English term that describes this phenomonen: procrastiworking (from ‘procrastinating’), doing any work other than writing.
Writing a little each day is a good strategy to both improve your productivity and to practise your English. At Charlesworth Author Services, we make the writing process even easier by teaching simple templates for academic writing in our courses. These templates can be followed to complete the different sections of an academic paper.
Writing an abstract, for example, can be done quite easily by simply writing down these four questions and then answering them, in sequence. We do this in our writing workshops, and it works well. Ask yourself:
• Why did you do the study?;
• What did you do?;
• What did you find?, and;
• What did you conclude?.
Give it a go. Write down a sentence or two to answer each of these questions and then delete the questions. This works well and you’ll end up with about 120 to 150 words that you can then expand, edit, and polish into your next conference or paper abstract. We also provide an abstract editing service as part of our expert language polishing portfolio.
What about easily writing the rest of your next paper? Our training courses, online materials, and blog articles contain numerous tips and tricks to help you navigate academic writing and maximise your potential as a researcher. Get in touch with our team for more information.
If you have general questions about academic writing, or face a specific issue with a paper you are currently working on, why not get in touch with one of our team at Charlesworth Author Services? All our expert editors have PhDs in specific subject areas: this differentiates us from our competitors!
Using Charlesworth Author Services ensures that your published work will be high quality in both language and subject-specific content.
Did you know that Charlesworth runs a free educational webinar at the end of each month? Why not sign up and learn something useful to advance your career? Find out more at www.cwauthors.com
Oh, and while we’re at it, one recent study suggests taking the rest of the summer off to further aid productivity. Not that there’s all that much of the summer left!
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