The benefits of writing

Audio: 5 min. 17 sec.

How does writing benefit my English?

When it comes to practicing English, everybody wants to talk.

Speaking is fun, easy to get into and a nice social activity.

You can practice speaking while having a drink, playing video games, even while working!

On the other hand, writing in English is a skill that very few people are enthusiastic about practicing.

This is understandable for a few reasons; it is a lot more time consuming, it often needs support from someone who is more skilled at English, and it just lacks the energy of conversation.

However, there are many compelling reasons to improve your writing.

I’m here to help explain why I think writing as a skill should be given a lot more focus by students and become a routine activity.

WRITING IMPROVES YOUR SPEAKING

You might find this hard to believe, but if you have read the blog about input English and output English, you will already know that both writing and speaking overlap as communication skills.

In order to get good at writing, you will learn how to organise your ideas and form sentences and paragraphs that sound good and flow nicely.

This directly translates to being able to speak better using these same improved structures, as well as a better sense of how to clearly express information.

Most well-known public speakers of significance like Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama are highly accomplished writers as well.

WRITING HELPS YOU NOTICE MISTAKES

It’s easy to make mistakes when you’re learning English.

Many common “simple” words like prepositions and basic verb tenses often get misused, but these mistakes tend to be ignored during conversation.

Not wanting to seem rude or perhaps not noticing, most people won’t correct someone during a conversation and that means that the mistake continues to remain in the speaker’s vocabulary.

Without being able to actually confront the mistake, it becomes a lot harder to fix it.

That’s what makes writing practice so valuable: You have a complete record of your produced language that you can look at any time!

When reviewing a previous day’s writing, it will become much easier to notice a misplaced pronoun, a verb in the wrong tense or an inappropriate word.

MOST ENGLISH EXAMS HAVE A WRITTEN COMPONENT

Whether you want to do IELTS, First Certificate or PTE, it is highly likely that the English exam you want to take will require you to pass a writing test as part of it.

Many students think they are ready to take an exam only to learn that they did not spend any time on their writing skills and therefore do not have the ability to pass that section of the exam.

It’s a much better idea to take the initiative and work on your writing from the very beginning rather than waiting until exam time to start improving it.

Exams generally test you on your ability to write essays and letters, both of which you can practice doing by yourself using a textbook or online resources.

WRITING WILL HELP YOU ABSORB DIFFICULT GRAMMAR AND VOCABULARY

When it comes to higher level language, it is almost impossible to properly internalise these new ideas and structures purely by listening, speaking and reading.

When trying to use new language it’s common to stumble while speaking and struggle to put the correct words together.

Once you start to look at more complicated ideas that have independent clauses and dependent clauses in one sentence, writing them out will become a much more efficient way of putting your new knowledge into practice.

This is also true regarding new vocabulary; a great way to help yourself remember words you have just learnt is by turning them into sentences in a notebook or diary entry.

For even stronger practice you can take multiple grammar points or vocabulary topics and try to utilise them in an extended piece of writing like an essay. 

I hope I have managed to convince at least some of you to give writing a stronger focus in your studies.

It’s true that it takes effort but remember that true improvement does not come easily; put your pen to paper and see what a difference it can make!