How to improve your English writing without a private teacher

Good writing is elegant, simple and clear. Bad writing is ugly and confusing.

Do you want to avoid ugly writing? Here are my top 2 tips to help you write elegant sentences.

Tip number 1: clarity always comes first

One of the many things that I learned when I was doing my Master’s in English Literature was this:

The only way you can impress your readers with your writing is by embracing clarity. Without clarity, your readers will be confused, and a confused reader is an unimpressed reader.

It doesn’t matter how much you know about your topic, how much data you include in your writing, and how many different tenses and phrases you use. If your sentences are unclear, no one will want to read what you’ve written. The question then is, how do you make your writing clear?

In English, the simplest way to write clearer sentences is to make them shorter than you would like them to be.

As students of English, we often associate good writing with long sentences. But in English, long sentences often lead to confusion. Here’s a long sentence I’ve written to show you how confusing they can be.

This is my long sentence

“John Doe, a London man arrested by the police eighteen months ago on suspicion of fraud, had the charges against him dropped on Tuesday after a surprise ruling on Monday when the judge overseeing his case declared him unfit to stand trial due to health problems.”

This sentence is a great example of how NOT to write in English.

Let me read my unimpressive sentence to you again. Notice how, by the time I get to the end of it, you’ve forgotten who I’m talking about or what that person did. In fact, you’ve hardly noticed any of the information I’ve given you.

Here’s my sentence again:

Even after a second reading, you still can’t tell what the most relevant information is. It leaves you wondering: who was charged with what? When? Who had health problems?

Let’s rewrite that sentence, this time with our readers in mind.

To help our readers focus on the most relevant information, first we’re going to make a list of the information that we want to include. This is an essential step in good writing. Making a list of the information you want to give to your readers has two main benefits:

First, it helps you clarify the message in your own head. The clearer the message is to you, the clearer it will be to your readers.
And second, listing the pieces of information helps you group them into sentences. It works like magic with all kinds of writing. I do it all the time.

If we analyse my original sentence, we’ll see that there are eleven pieces of information. They are:

John Doe is a London man
he was arrested by the police
the arrest took place eighteen months ago
he was suspected of fraud
the charges against him were dropped
they were dropped on Tuesday
there is a judge overseeing his case
the judge made a surprise ruling
the surprise ruling took place on Monday
the judge declared Mr Doe unfit to stand trial
and Mr Doe has health problems

Let’s see what happens when we group those eleven pieces of information into several sentences. We now have a paragraph with three sentences that sound like this:

The first sentence is: On Tuesday the police dropped the charges against John Doe.

The second sentence is: The London man was arrested eighteen months ago on suspicion of fraud.

And the third sentence is: In a surprise ruling on Monday, the judge overseeing his case declared Mr Doe unfit to stand trial due to health problems.

I’ll read the whole paragraph to you:

On Tuesday the police dropped the charges against John Doe. The London man was arrested eighteen months ago on suspicion of fraud. In a surprise ruling on Monday, the judge overseeing his case declared Mr Doe unfit to stand trial due to health problems.

Having three sentences instead of one makes the pieces of information stand out more easily.

Also, to improve the clarity of the message, notice that I’ve made other changes to my original sentence. For example, the third sentence in the new paragraph doesn’t use the pronoun “him” to refer to the man mentioned at the beginning. Instead, I’ve repeated his name: “Mr Doe”.

Also, in the new paragraph, subjects and verbs are closer together, which is another way of making your writing clearer.

If you want to get more tips as well as writing exercises, have a look at my English writing course.

In this post I’m giving you two tips to help you write elegant sentences.

Tip number 1 was: clarity always comes first

Let’s now see the second tip.

Find out more about Maria’s
English writing course

Tip number 2: focus on your message

Your potential readers have an endless choice of reading material to choose from. How can you get them to read yours?

Making your writing more attractive will dramatically increase your chances of being read. One of the main features of attractive writing is focus. The more your writing focuses on your message, the more likely it is to be read.

As a reader, when I encounter writing that has no focus, I simply abandon it. It could be a blog post, newspaper article, book or someone’s update on social media.

If it has no focus, I don’t read it. Why should I? Life is too precious to be wasted on poor writing.

To increase your chances of being read, you need to avoid being vague. In other words, your writing needs to focus sharply on your message. To do that, you need to ask yourself these two questions:

The first question is: what message am I trying to pass on to my readers?

And the second question is: of the information I have, what is essential and what is irrelevant to my message?

Notice how these two questions force you to consider your writing from the point of view of your reader. You may have a vague message in mind and plenty of information to give, but your reader only wants a focused message and the most relevant information.

Let’s see how to write with our readers in mind.

Suppose we want to write about the arrest and subsequent release of John Doe, the London man we met before. First, we would make a list with all the information we have.

Let’s say that, apart from the eleven pieces of information we listed before, we also had these other four:

Mr Doe recently got married.
On Sunday he travelled to Manchester to visit his cousin Jane.
He plays golf in Scotland twice a year.
And his childhood dream was to become an actor.

As interesting as all that may be, we’re not writing a novel. We’re writing about John Doe’s arrest and subsequent release, and those four pieces of information don’t focus on that message. Therefore, we must disregard them.

But what if our pieces of information also included that:

Mr Doe had been arrested ten years ago in California.
He had been found guilty by a Los Angeles court.
And the crime he was found guilty of was fraud.

Now, that would be extremely relevant to our story, and something that our readers would want to know. So we must include it.

Learning to tell the difference between essential and irrelevant information takes time and practice. The more you write, the faster you’ll be able to decide which information is relevant.

But how do you improve your English writing without a private teacher? How do you get better at writing if you have no one to correct what you’ve written?

I’m going to show you a fabulous exercise that you’re going to love.

A fabulous exercise to improve your English writing on your own

Writing beautifully is not a skill that only a chosen few are born with.

Most great authors were not great when they started writing. In fact, they often had their first works rejected by publishers. What made them great was their determination to become better writers.

One of the exercises that many of those great authors frequently did is called: copywork.

The basic definition of copywork is this: copywork is the act of copying what others have written.

Some of the great authors that used copywork to improve their skills are: Benjamin Franklin, Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson.

For your copywork to be effective it requires these three essential elements:

Number 1: you must choose texts that are right for you.
Number 2: you need to focus sharply while you’re doing it.
And number 3: you need to do it frequently and regularly.

Let’s go through these three essential elements in more depth.

Number 1: choose texts that are right for you.

For example, if your everyday work requires you to write scientific papers, copy the best written papers in your field.

If you’re an economist, copy well written economy reports, or articles you find in the most reputable publications.

And if you’re preparing for an exam, copy sample exams.

Essential element number 2 is: focus sharply while you’re copying.

The more you focus on the text you’re copying, the faster you’ll improve. Make sure you notice the word order and punctuation, pay attention to the grammar, and spot new phrases.

Focusing sharply is difficult, so you might want to use a timer. The first few times you do copywork, set the timer to ten, or even just five minutes.

Five minutes of focused copywork are much more effective than an hour of distracted scribbling.

Essential element number 3 is: do copywork frequently and regularly.

If you do an hour of copywork a month you’re not going to see much improvement.

Aim at doing ten minutes a day, six days a week, and your writing will improve substantially within a few weeks. Soon you’ll notice that, the faster you improve, the more motivated you’ll feel to do more copywork. It’s a virtuous circle.

To finish, I have a golden tip for you

To multiply the effectiveness of your copywork, whenever you finish copying a text, don’t move on to another text.

Instead, copy it a second time.

The second time you copy a text you’ll notice how much you missed the first time. You’ll be a lot more aware of the word order, punctuation, grammar and new phrases. That will help you become a better writer more quickly.

To make it easy for you to improve your English writing, I’ve created a course that gives you your daily ten minutes of copywork, and tracks your progress.

For four weeks you get to copy extracts from some great novels. For example:

The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde
The Jungle Book
The Great Gatsby
Middlemarch
Animal Farm, and more.

I’ve also included text from authors like:

Charles Dickens
Virginia Woolf
Oscar Wilde
Conan Doyle
Henry James, and others.

And you also get to copy extracts from some great non-fiction books, for example:

The History of the Telephone
Your Mind and How to Use It
Soap-Making Manual
The Story Of Electricity
and The Life of Abraham Lincoln.

Plus books on military ciphers, woodworking, surgery, fossils, etc.