Writing

What do you understand by “Writing”? In elementary school, you learnt to write the letters in the alphabet, then words and sentences. In middle school, you learnt to write essays, and in college, you learnt the skills that helped you write a term paper or an academic essay. In this blog, you’ll learn process writing. In simple terms, you’ll learn the skills that you’ll need in the process of writing a 5-paragraph essay. This is really fundamental.  Nevertheless, those who are currently learning academic essay could also benefit from this blog by looking at how paragraphs are organised.

A common fallacy is that writing is easy – just put your thoughts onto a piece of paper. Wrong! When my students  join the foundation English and Intensive English programmes, many of them are not aware that the process of writing consists of 3 stages, and an essay contains 3 parts . On the first day of class, I would always get my new students to write an essay so that I could gauge how much they’ve learnt when they were in secondary school or high school. To my horror, their essays were not systematic, paragraphs were incoherent, and points were all mixed up. Yet, they’re expected to be able to produce a good 5-paragraph essay in the final exam 3 months later. I’d not even checked their grammar and spelling. I also discovered that process writing is still not taught at the secondary school level, and many English teachers either do not know or are not bothered to go through the writing process with their students.

I learnt how difficult writing is when I did my first degree. The lecturer made us redo our drafts again and again and again till we got it right. We had three drafts (some of us, more) of the same title. It was very tedious, but we eventually knew why.

Lessons in this writing section

Click on one of the links to take you to that lesson:

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