Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[musicgold]

Hi,

I am a non-native English speaker and need some tips on improving my professional writing style. My job involves writing analysis of various economic and financial events and my career growth is in jeopardy as my writing style is not as professional as my English speaking colleagues.

To explain you about my level of English writing, I have easily passed exams like TOEFL and IELTS, and comfortable with different grammar rules.

My problem is I get stuck with sentences which I have never constructed before. I don�t understand how to explain a situation in sentences that are easy to understand but don�t sound awkward.

As for my efforts to improve my writing, I have tried two methods:
1. Writing a page on some topic everyday.
2. Noting down unfamiliar sentence constructions in whatever I read.

The problem I found with the first method is the review of what I write. I don�t know anybody who can review my writing for me everyday.

With respect to the second method, I have collected 70-80 pages of unfamiliar/ new sentence constructions so far ( in a Word document). However, I don�t know how to leverage this database. I can�t read all of it in one setting, and just use the collection to look up for examples.

Could you please suggest me some methods that can help me in improving my professional writing?

Thanks,

MG.

[Bob S.]

I don't know. It sounds like you are going in the right direction. One thing we are taught is that we should read a lot. It builds vocabulary and grammar comprehension, especially if you are reading from very erudite writers (I'm partial to the writing style of George Will myself as you are forced to think just to follow his grammar and vocabulary).

As for your massive list of sentences, is there a way for you to analyze them for their grammar structure? e.g.
Sentence 1: Noun subject, past perfect verb, adverbial preposition.
Sentence 2: Gerund noun, verb of being, predicate adjective.
etc.

You may start to see patterns, and you can group them accordingly. Maybe then you can begin to see how different patterns are used for different situations.
____________________
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-Bruce Froemming, Baseball umpire

[musicgold]

Thanks.

[nicewitch]

I understand your problem as I have the same because I'm french and is never easy to write right in another language.
Reading good books is a very good option.
Another one would be to write in your own way all you want to express and them translate into good english by rewwriting yourself
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