4 Simple Steps to Master English Writing

Writing is difficult, even for native speakers.

We often find ourselves asking:

What word should I choose?

Should I use the passive voice?

What else should I include?

Do I need to provide examples?

We’ve all been there.

In the beginning, I thought that writing was only difficult for me,

for us,

non-native English speakers.

But it turns out that even native English speakers struggle.

Writing is an art.

Not everyone can be creative and paint with words.

Writing is like painting with letters.

Unless you grab your brush and start drawing, nothing will be painted.

But it doesn’t need to be hard.

We all have a creative edge; we just need to practice.

So, I figured out the only way for us, non-native speakers, to write in English is to start writing in English.

Do not wait until you have the perfect moment.

I am going to share a very basic writing system that will help you start writing and improve along the way.

This system is called

B D E R

(Brainstorming, Drafting, Editing, Revising), and the steps are as follows:

Brainstorming

Brainstorm as many ideas as you can. Keep a note specifically dedicated to your ideas. Have access to it on your phone. I use Google Docs and have access to it on my phone. So whenever a new idea comes to me, I jot it down on that document. So when I am in the mood for writing, I have an inventory of ideas. This should be very simple, just a way to write down whatever comes to your mind. Here is an example of my current brainstorming document:

Drafting

We procrastinate writing because we fear failure.

We fear producing poor-quality sentences.

We fear making mistakes.

So we postpone it until we feel that we are focused, in the mood, and ready to produce a cutting-edge piece of writing.

But let me tell you, that will rarely happen and you will end up feeling discouraged, behind, and you start telling yourself writing is not for you.

It is for the professional English speaker authors and journalists. That is not true because they also struggle but they start anyway because they believe in themselves and they have a system.

What you need to do is to pick one of your ideas from the previous step, the brainstorming, and just write whatever comes to mind.

Do not think about structure or grammar.

Even if you made an obvious spelling mistake, like “sh” instead of “she”, do not fix it. Just focus on your mind and let the thoughts spill out and get all your ideas in sentences in your draft as far as you can.

The trick here is just to focus on writing, do not alter structure, do not fix obvious mistakes. Keep your writing running.

Editing

In this step, you need to compile your draft and evaluate each sentence and start making changes and fix the grammar and the sentence structure and see if you need to arrange them in paragraphs.

This might take time but you can speed up the process by using software such as Grammarly to check for grammar mistakes.

Reviewing

This is the last step and I advise taking some time off between the third step, Editing, and the fourth step, Reviewing.

This is just to give your mind some space and refresh then it can catch any error you did not catch in step 3.

By doing this, you can produce a lot and maintain quality. Also by keeping a journal of your ideas, when you feel you are in the writing mood, you always have something to write about.