Writing skills

To write properly is not as easy as one might think. You must keep some general rules in mind:

• the content: be precise and say why you are writing, give relevant information and keep in mind who you are addressing to.

• the structure: go from the most general information to the most precise, give examples if necessary and "guide" the person who is reading your text to the principal point. Use paragraphs to organise your ideas and connectors to link sentences.

• richness: variety of vocabulary, of tenses, of connectors and so on. The person who is reading you should be pleased to read your text, if not he/she will stop reading it.

• accuracy: you shouldn't make mistakes and you should use complex sentences in order to be more accurate. Punctuation is also important.

Remember these will be the four marks you'll get when I give you back your composition.

About how to write the text, the steps you should follow are these.

1. Read carefully what you are asked to do: what do they want me to do? what  is this for? what piece of writing is this: a letter, an e-mail, an article ...? 
2. Have a draft of your writing but DON'T write it twice because you won't have enough time and then follow it.
3. Be sure you have paragraphs and there are enough (neither few nor too many) connectors
4. Once you've finished, read it again to check it's understandable and correct the typical mistakes.
5. Try to be precise, clean and neat in your writing.

To sum up, take into accaunt that the reader is not in your head and the only way to know what you want to say is by reading your piece of writing.