EnglishWritingStrategy_BasedonThreeSteps

Are you struggling to meet your coursework deadlines? Finding it hard to get to grips with your essay topics? Does your writing sometimes lack structure and style? Would you like to improve your grades?

Here pops up a question: how to write a good English composition?

Composition, no matter what type of text is at stake, is generally described as the result of several processes: planning, sentence generation, and revising. That is，pre-writing, while-writing, and post-writing.

Pre-writing

1.1 Writing purpose

Before you start to write, there are some questions to ask yourself:

1. What is my reason for writing this composition?

2. What do I hope to accomplish with it?

We just write for the teacher? Of course not. As a matter of fact, we should write on target. As the renowned 19th Century Scottish poet and novelist Robert Louis Stevenson put it, “The dif? culty is not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.”

1.2 Writing to whom

Whenever you write, you are interacting with other members of the society. Are you writing to a friend of yours? To a colleague? To the director of your business firm? To a customer who has written to you to complain about the quality of a product or service? In each situation, you have a different social relationship with your audience and this relationship has a de? nite impact on the shape of your writing.

Writers often get caught up in our own agendas rather than put ourselves in the readers’ shoes. Always put your readers’ needs first by using “reader-centered” writing. Thinking, drafting, editing, and organizing from your readers’ points of view. If you want to improve your writing, you’d better put yourself in readers’ shoes.

While-writing

First, let’s find out what elements attribute to a good writing. What is good writing, anyway? Different cultures using different languages may come up with very different answers to the question. Indeed, even different individuals may have different standards, tastes or expectations. However, as far as English is concerned, a set of basic characteristics, which is believed to be present in all good writing, has been promoted:

Good writing = good content + writing skills.

2.1 Content

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club,” Jack London, the famous American writer once said.

Inspiration is wonderful, when it happens. The problem is that it is notoriously unreliable. As ? ckle as the inspiration can be, we should turn to a more stable way: a lot of thinking.

Good thinking leads to good writing, and muddy thinking can only result in muddy writing. As simple as that. Writing is a thinking process; it is not making a big deal out of nothing, not the so-called moaning and complaining loudly when one is not sick. Good writing should be substantive, really having things to say. Not only having things to say, but also having insightful things to say about the topic.

While thinking about the appropriate materials for the writing, we should avoid topics that are too broad or too narrow.

Compare with those two groups:

Group A: 1. Disease has shaped human history.

2. Insects are fascinating creatures.

3. Men and women are very different.

4. The speed limit near my home is sixty-? ve miles per hour.

English Writing Strategy

－Based on Three Steps

Abstract:Ｍany junior high school students have trouble in writing English composition, and this paper is primarily divided into three steps of pre-writing, while-writing and post-writing to answer the question: How to write a composition.

Key words:English writing; writing strategy

[中图分类号]H319　[文献标识码] A　[文章编号]

1009-6167

(2012)-01-0087-02作者简介：翁朝袅，研究生。研究方向：英语语言学、英语教学法。

翁朝袅漳州师范学院外语系

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5. A hurricane hit southern Florida last summer.

6. A person must be at least thirty-? ve years old in order to be elected president of the United States.

Group B: 1. In the mid-1980s, AIDS changed people’s attitudes about dating.

2. Strength, organization, and communication make ants one of nature’s most successful insects.

3. Men and women are often treated very differently in the workplace.

4. The speed limit near my home should be lowered to ? fty-? ve miles per hour for several reasons.

5. Federal of? cials made a number of mistakes in their response to the recent Florida hurricane.

6. The requirement that a U.S. president must be at least thirty-? ve years old is unfair and unreasonable.

Apparently, group B is better than group A. Group A is either too broad or too narrow.

2.2 Writing Skills

Writing is not simply “writing things down”, it is not practiced in isolation, rather, skills are practiced in an interdependent fashion, which included: structure, flow, argument, etc. In other words, your writing should be logical, clear, succinct, and consistent.

For every student, he should be familiar with ? ve basic sentences, they are:

(1) S+V

(2) S+V+O

(3) S+V+O+O ? rst draft, you are at the start of the writing process. When a draft is completed, the job of writing can begin. Good writing involves thoughtful revision.

Peter F. Drucker, the prolific business writer, calls his first draft “the zero draft”－after that he can start counting. Most writers share the feeling that the first draft, and all of those which follow, are opportunities to discover what they have to say and how they can best say it. Anthony Burgess, one of the most proli? c writers in the English-speaking world, admits, “I might revise a page twenty times.” Roald Dahl, the popular children’s writer, states, “By the time I’m nearing the end of a story, the ? rst part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least 150 times...good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.”

But some people might complain about the process of revision as following:

1. It is tedious to read one’s own paper.

2. It is hard to ? nd one's own mistakes.

Here are some tips for you:

1. Read it word by word

2. Ask others to read

3. Revise your writing carefully more than 3 times.

Conclusion

It is a common phenomenon in students’ writing, that is, after learning how to write in English for many years in senior high schools, students are still poor in writing. They either had 4