When you write English, do you often make a lot of mistakes?

If you do, this video is for you.

Now, making mistakes is fine as long as other people can understand your writing.

But it can be a problem in some situations like when you're trying to write a resume, taking an English exam, or sending an email to your boss at work.

In these situations, poor writing can make you look unprofessional.

It can affect the outcome of your job application, the score of your exam, or whether you'll get a promotion.

So if you want to be prepared for these situations, let me show you the writing exercise that I do to improve my own writing skills.

To do this exercise, you need to find something that was written by a native English speaker.

This could be an article on the Internet, a chapter from a book, or even a resume.

So here I have an article titled "How to Find a Hobby."

And I'm going to practice my writing with this article.

So first, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to read the first sentence and make sure that I understand everything.

If there's a word or phrase I don't know, I'll look it up.

So let'say I don't know what the phrase means, I can go to Google and type in that phrase.

All right. So "line of work" means the activity in your life that you do to earn money.

So it basically means a job or an occupation.

Okay.

Now that I understand the whole sentence, I'm going to take a moment to memorize it.

Then, I'll switch to this text editor and I will write down the sentence from memory.

Now, if I can't remember some of the words in the sentence, I'll just make a guess or I might use other words with similar meanings.

Okay.

Next, I'm going to compare what I wrote with the original to see if I made any mistakes.

And if I did, I will correct them.

Okay.

After I've fixed my mistakes, I'll write the sentence one more time without making the same mistakes.

So I'm going to delete this and do it one more time.

And that's it.

After I'm done with the first sentence, I'll repeat the same steps with the next sentence.

So, step 1: I read and memorize the sentence.

Step 2: I write down the sentence from memory.

Step 3: I compare what I wrote with the original.

This time, I didn't make any mistakes, so I don't have to do anything.

But if I did make mistakes, I will correct them and I will delete this sentence and write it down one more time for repetition.

Now, when you do this exercise, you'll often come across long sentences like this one.

This is very common in written English.

And it can be difficult for beginners to memorize them.

So, whenever you have to practice with a long sentence like this, you can break it down into smaller parts and practice one part at a time.

So, for this sentence, you can practice this part first.

So you do all the steps with just this part before moving on to the second part.

Okay. So that's how I practice my writing.

I usually do this exercise for about 15 - 30 minutes.

It's simple. It's easy to do, and very effective.

So what are the benefits of this writing exercise?

Well, when you do this exercise, you're learning a lot of things.

You're learning how to form sentences correctly.

You're learning how to use adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, and so on.

And of course, you're learning a lot of new words and phrases, and not just their meanings, but also how to use them in writing.

So if you often have trouble finding the right words to use in your writing, this exercise is for you.

Now, other than this exercise, there's one more thing you must do if you want to write English well, and that is to read in English regularly.

Although the writing exercise we talked about is very effective, you can only do it if you have a computer or a pen and paper.

It's difficult to practice when you're riding the train or sitting in the dentist's office.

I mean...it's possible to do it if you really want to.

But it's going to be very inconvenient and awkward.

And this is where reading comes in.

Reading is easy to do.

You can read almost anytime and anywhere.

All you need is an English book, or you can use your phone to read websites that you find interesting.

But why is reading so important?

Why should you read a lot if you want to improve your writing?

Well, you can't write English well unless you expose yourself to a lot of well-written English first.

If you constanty read the writing of people who write better than you, your writing will gradually get better.

So there you go.

Those are the two things that I do to improve my English writing.

Number one: I practice my writing with the exercise I showed you, and number two: I read a lot in English.