How to improve writing skills in a short period of time?
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yuhuaisheng
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Fri May 12, 2006 4:05 am
How to improve writing skills in a short period of time?
I'm helping a senior high school student with his writing. He needs to improve his abilities quickly since the examination is drawing near. What shall i do? I'm looking forward to your reply.Many thanks in advance.
Most of my intermediate-level writing students need help with the following:
1) past tense verbs
2) articles (a, an, the)
3) introduction sentences/1st sentence of paragraphs
4) summaries/last sentence or paragraph of essays
Usually, if you work on those four topics their writing will look more professional quickly.
But your student may be different. Try to figure out what your student's individual weaknesses are, and work from there. If the student is a beginner, for example, you may need to start with basic subject+verb sentence structure and go on from there.
Good luck,
-EH
1) past tense verbs
2) articles (a, an, the)
3) introduction sentences/1st sentence of paragraphs
4) summaries/last sentence or paragraph of essays
Usually, if you work on those four topics their writing will look more professional quickly.
But your student may be different. Try to figure out what your student's individual weaknesses are, and work from there. If the student is a beginner, for example, you may need to start with basic subject+verb sentence structure and go on from there.
Good luck,
-EH
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Sally Olsen
- Posts: 1322
- Joined: Thu Apr 08, 2004 2:24 pm
- Location: Canada,France, Brazil, Japan, Mongolia, Greenland, Canada, Mongolia, Ethiopia next
Has the student seen the exam to know what is expected? Some students just need to see the style of answer they will be required to write and then they can practice various topics until they are confident they handle any question that arises. I used to give my students 50 examples from former exams and we went through them to find out what format was expected - introductory sentence summing up the topic, examples, support for arguments, summing up. I encouraged them to write the introductory sentence last as then they knew what they had covered in the paragraph. Then we broke it down even further and looked at sentence connection, coherence, verb agreement, verb tenses most often used, sentence constructions and so on depending on their level. A lot of the student's frustration with exams is often that they don't know what is coming.