Whether English is your first, second, or third language, developing your writing abilities will help you in educational, work, and social media contexts. In this lesson, I will talk about writing in general and discuss both formal and informal writing. It is critical to learn the difference between formal and informal writing, including differences based on vocabulary, grammar, and format. I will teach you some strategies for how to plan your writing. My five tips will help you improve your writing regardless of your current level. Watch the video, follow my advice, and your writing will improve. Test yourself with the quiz at www.engvid.com/my-top-5-writi...
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TRANSCRIPT
Hello. My name is Emma, and in today's video I am going to teach you some great writing tips. These tips are for both academic writing and non-academic writing. Okay? So it's for writing in general. Now, this video is going to be in two parts, because I have so many tips, so I'm going to give five tips in this video and five tips in the next video. Okay, so let's get started.
So, there are so many different ways... Or so many different types of writing we do in our lives; we write emails, we write essays if we're a student, we might write a Facebook post, or we might write a resume or a cover letter. So it's very important to develop your writing skills because you will be writing throughout your life a lot. So let's look at my first tip.
My first tip is: It's very important to think about the genre of what you're writing. "Genre" is a very fancy word that pretty much means type. So, a genre of writing might be an essay, or it might be a cover letter, or an email, or a tweet. These are all different genres, and each one of these has a different expectation on what you should include and how you should write it. So it's very important, first step is: Know the genre or know the type, and know what is expected of you.
Also important in this is knowing your audience, or thinking about your audience. So, for example, if you write an email, the language you're going to use and the way you're going to write will be different if you write an email to your friend versus an email to your boss. So it's important to think about: "Who are you writing to?" because this is going to help you decide what to write and how to write it. Same with, you know, if you are on Twitter and you write a tweet, or on Facebook a Facebook post, you know, it's important to think about your audience. You know, are you writing this post for friends to see, or is this a post your boss might see, or members of the public? You know, and that could be a problem. So it's important to think about, especially with this and on other social media, too: Audience. Who will see this and what will they think about it, and what are their expectations? You know, some people work for companies where they're responsible for social media, so it's important, too, the type of wording they use when they're writing on Facebook. If you work at a company and you're writing for your company, it's going to be different than if you're writing for your friends. Same with an essay. An essay has a certain structure, you know, it's supposed to be a certain amount of pages, it has a certain organization to it, and so knowing what's expected of you when you write an essay will help you because it's going to be very different than, for example, a Facebook post. Same with in business, business reports. Understanding the format of a business report is important if this is something you're going to be writing, and thinking about your audience. Same with executive summaries, which is a type of thing businesspeople write. If you're not in business you might not ever write one of these, but if you are in business you need to realize that audience is important because professionals are going to be reading this, and these people are busy, so, you know, knowing your audience and knowing what is expected of you is the very first step to good writing. Let's look at some other tips.
Okay, so we've talked about genre or the type of writing you're doing, and part of this is knowing the expectations for how long what you write should be. Okay? So you want to know a bit about length expectations before you start writing. This is really important, especially in university where you often have a number of pages you're allowed to write. It's important, you know, in the workplace because sometimes, you know, you can't write a lot. […]