Guide to Success

Writing is one of the weak points among Chinese learners of English. You, as a distance learner, should make extra efforts in improving this skill, because the bulk of course assessment will be done in writing. The first course of your second academic year, English for Studying, is mainly designed to enhance your writing for academic purposes.

Rewriting

It is extremely important. To start with, feel pleased with yourself if you could only manage to squeeze out a few words or a couple of sentences. Put them away and come back later. Rewrite, and revise, ... rewrite and revise. This is a natural process of improving your writing.

In A Guide to Success 2: Learning Strategies, we shall make further recommendations about writing improvement.

Note also that writing is very hard at the beginning. However, the more you write, the less difficult it will become. Time will come when you really enjoy writing. You are full of ideas and you cannot help but write them down.


	Do you like me to share with you my experience in learning writing? Yes?! It was extremely difficult at the beginning. I spent hours sitting at the desk, but nothing came out, a few broken sentences at best. I even started sweating over the blank paper in front of me! "It's no good like this", I said to myself. "I must do something."


	I bought myself a pocket notebook, and called it "Writing Treasure Book". I started collecting all useful expressions and sentence structures and put them in an alphabetical order. Although they can be easily found in reference books or dictionaries, they are not mine. Only those in my Treasure Book are mine, because they are there through my own labour. Even now I still have the habit of keeping a writing treasure book. I collect those expressions that are cleverly worded beyond my imagination.


	I also bought myself a file case, in which I stored all sorts of sample writing, like an invitation, a business letter, a love letter, a memo, a good piece of description, a resume and so on. When I had a writing task, I first reviewed the sample writing in my file case.


	I always forced myself to think in English. At the beginning I tried to write in Chinese first, then "translated" it into English. This proved to be very harmful. I would never be able to grasp the English way of expressing myself.


	My friend, what are you going to do? Any idea? It's time to make up your mind and put it down.