4 easy tips on how to improve your English writing skills by blogging written by yours truly.
In case you haven’t read my About page *abitofshamelesspromotionhere* you would know that I first started this blog to improve my elementary level English skills. After graduating high school, I had a 3 months holiday and with nothing productive to do I decided to open a new blog to brush up my English and unsurprisingly,
it works.
And it would work for you too.
Disclaimer: I still suck at English and sometimes only after re-reading my posts I realized there are still several grammar mistakes here and there so take my advice with a1. CREATE A BLOG AND WRITE
First of all, you have to own a blog and if you don’t have one please create one. You can just use the already pre-equipped free Blogger templates for the blog design because you don’t need a fancy blog layout to write in English, right? But, if you do want one that looks nice, there are a huge collection of free and beautiful blog designs at Gooyabi. Anyway, after all the hassle of creating the blog, the next step that you should do is
You write.
Write everything that crossed your mind. What you did for a day, what you eat for today, just write anything. I know it’s hard because my mind went into a blank mode pretty fast trying to get out all those vocabularies while applying grammar rules that I learned from school into my first blog post. If you don’t believe me, here I present to you my first blog post.
The first step is always the hardest.
Always.
2. READ
Ah, of course.
Reading.
Reading is an essential step in learning language because from books you learned new words and the more you read, the more you could churn out new ideas to write. This is an easy step to do for me since I am a self-certified bookworm so to those who basically read a one or two books in a year see below.
3. VISIT PINTEREST, TUMBLR AND REDDIT FOR INSPIRATIONS
My personal pick would be Tumblr because there are tonnes of gifs, pictures and accounts where you can find something that interests you and use those as blogging materials. Plus, there is also a lot of language learning Tumblr aka langbr who offered a lot of English learning tips that would be useful when you’re writing in English.
4. ASK BLOGGERS AROUND FOR HELP
So you’ve done writing your post and hit the publish button. Go and do some blog walking and ask bloggers around to help you by giving a one or two pointers. Don’t be shy because as far as I’ve known, the majority of the bloggers around are friendly and will gladly help you. If you’re still shy and feel like asking others for help is too much of work, there are free online grammar and spelling checker websites like Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, Language Tool and Online Correction that could help check your writing automatically. It might not be as accurate as the human proofreader but it gets the job done.
Anyway, to practice writing it doesn’t mean that you have to write using a blogging platform. You can always write posts on your Facebook, Tumblr, or any other social media but if you’re one of those people who’re afraid that some of your social media friends decide to be a bitch and screenshot your grammar and vocabulary filled mistakes posts and posted it to the rest of the world to see, then yeah,
blogging is for you.
Yeah, you.
81 comments
Thanks for your tips. I’m Italian and I have an English blog too. I started to write in English to improve my writing skills and to “place” on a text words, expressions, idioms I met during my studies.
As you wrote, it’s sometimes hard to get inspired, to find the topic to write about. My desire now is to write much often. And maybe it could be a good idea to write about what I read or learn during this journey: the journey of learning a foreign language.
You’re welcome! Can you give me the link of your blog so I can read it? Thank you!
I used to have a blog written in Malay then I dared myself to write a blog in full English and indirectly improved my English. Thank you for the tips! 🙂
Oh, I didn’t know that. Your English is extremely good!