Improving your writing

Improving your writing requires that you start writing in the first place. It seems obvious, but for many of you this is the kind of activity that would rather be postponed. You may favour traditional grammar exercises focusing on conjugation, or word agreements, rather than on starting writing in the foreign language you are learning. That is a mistake.

Your writing practice is meant to do a number of very beneficial things. It is about you applying in a communicative context your knowledge of grammar and vocabulary.

Writing tasks present you with the opportunity to write for the first time in Spanish. These tasks normally come with a focus on both grammar and vocabulary within a restricted topic.

Setting yourself to write forces you to think about the grammar and vocabulary you need to learn from a new perspective. By writing you can see whether you really have understood how the language works.

Writing gives you a taste for the sort of task you will be expected to do for a formative and summative assessments. Not in a theoretical way, but hands on. By writing you will be improving your writing, because it produces an opportunity to get feedback. Once you get feedback you need to reflect on it, before you do more writing. This virtuous circle is going to make the whole difference for when you need to write under exam conditions, for example. By writing you will gain the confidence and knowledge that, combined, will see you through your task successfully.

Also, writing is a great way to test yourself.  Do some revision within a particular topic/grammar content, then write, then revise again and check out for any possible mistakes. In this context, it is worth thinking first of  how you would write something in English and then try to replicate that into Spanish. The language you know better will give you the anchoring you need to put your ideas together in a coherent and well organised way. Many times there is a good degree of similarity in the way both Spanish and English structure sentences. Although there are some exceptions, such as the position of adjectives. This normally is sequenced as noun+ adjective in Spanish, as you probably know already.

Lastly, writing prepares you for the next piece of writing, in that by both trying and getting feedback you may understand better what approach/strategy works best for you. You need to take this seriously, because nobody can do this for you.  You will become more attuned to the idiosyncrasies of the language, as you keep trying. In addition, you will become little by little more at home with your making mistakes and learning from them. This, in turn, will make you remember important grammar content and words much more easily and better.

Improving your writing skills means that you cannot use Google to translate. Because you would be missing a great deal of the knowledge and understanding that you acquire by assembling your piece together yourself. Writing can do a lot for you to consolidate and integrate the different aspects of the language that you come across bit by bit. But only if do yourself. By taking time to think. By piecing together all the different grammar and vocabulary building blocks you learn about from the start. It is you alone who has to merge those together in some meaningful and well structured unit.

Once you get feedback on your work, spend a few minutes deciding what you are learning from it. Ask questions if something is not clear. Then plan consequentially for the next one. How are you going to improve either in approach, preparation or both? This list is just an example of the kind of things you may want to become more alert to and consider when you write your next piece.