Last Essay (Donghyuk, Na)

Donghyuk Na
ENG 2F - 002
Prof. Leslie Bai
Apr. 29th, 2009

The ideas to improve writing skills

Most of the students including me have studied English for long time. Moreover, even at this moment, I study English. However, it is not easy to express myself in English and that fact hurts me a lot. From the beginning of my English learning, I have studied grammar, vocabulary and idioms with enthusiasm, but in Korea such practices are mainly scheduled for the entrance exam in college. Therefore, I think that I did not learn alive and active English. In spite of my lack of ability in writing, I want to learn here self-confidence that enables me to write even a single sentence.
Writing is important way to express my thinking and opinion. In my major field, which is business field, I need to write a lot of thing to do such as business plan, market analysis, etc. From this reason, writing skills are very important for me. Here are some ideas, based on my personal experience, how to improve my writing skills in English.

1. Spend at least one hour everyday listening to news or some other English programs. It's hard to understand what they are saying when you first begin to listen to them, but gradually you'll get used to the speed and tone. Then you can get a brief idea of what they are talking about, although you can't get the detail.
2. Spend more than one hour every day on reading English news or articles. Reading builds up your vocabulary, idioms, phrases, and the concepts of English structures. If you do enough reading, it will save you a lot of time since you will not need to spend more time on building your vocabulary or grammar. Also, read out loud when you do your reading so that you can improve your pronunciation at the same time.
3. Make friends with native-English speakers. This is the most difficult task because of the difference in culture, but you can't really master English unless you can communicate with a native English speaker fluently. You have to know enough things and have good listening skills if you want to have good conversations with an American. From the conversations, we can learn many English structure concepts.
4. Watch some English TV. TV is the best and most inexpensive teacher to learn real English. Not only you can learn formal English from news or debate TV programs.
5. Use an English-English dictionary and bring your dictionary wherever you go. If you find some words that you don't know, look them up in your dictionary immediately. There are some example sentences that can help your writing skills more effetely.
6. Use your newly-learned idioms or vocabulary. Once you use the words which you memorized, you will never forget them again

All these ideas are about the way of improving writing skills more successfully. These ideas also can be good way to increase speaking, reading, and other English skills.
Most students spend a lot of their time for learning English writing, but their achievements are different. Why is the difference? How much time you spend for learning English writing is not important. The answer is study habits.