English is one of the newest languages in the world, with over 1.5 billion people speaking it. This showcases the language’s importance and relevance in the modern world. Consequently, people need to learn the language to access the best universities and communicate with large masses.
Therefore, writing an essay is one of the best ways to hone your English reading and writing skills. This is because essays involve different skills, which expand your knowledge and grasp of the language to create highly readable sentences. That way, today, we will focus on essay writing and how to use it to write and read better.
Also, you can use it to work on your spelling and grammar, followed by organisation and presentation. So, in the next section, we will discuss how essay writing contributes to the expansion of your reading and writing skills.
Tips to Improve English Reading and Writing Skills
Essay writing has been at the helm of the writing world. It allows writers to express and showcase their writing ability in a miniature form. For instance, you can see Virginia Woolf, Orwell, and James Baldwin using essays to express their views. But for you, it can be a way to improve your English speaking and writing skills.
Here are a few ways essays can improve your reading and writing skills –
Read, Read, and Read Enough
One of the critical aspects of essay writing is reading many books and articles, which can give you information and also brush up your English vocabulary. Often, writers and journalists use words and phrases that are foreign to most people. Due to this, you need to search for the meaning to understand its relevance and then use it in your essay-writing process.
This will help you to learn new words and sentences, which will improve your vocabulary and grasp of the language. Moreover, writers also use various literary devices like –
- Oxymoron
- Simily
- Irony
- Personification
- Metaphor
All of these devices will help you write narrative essays and improve your reading and writing quality. Therefore, read various authors like Dostoyevsky, Camus, and Hesse, who are brilliant in the way they write and narrate incidents. For more, you can visit the website of Ivory Research, which can give a better demonstration of the subject.
Dictionary, Your Constant Companion
Another thing that you should do is keep a dictionary close to you. Today, you can access various dictionary applications, which will help you to write and read better. This is because dictionaries carry unique words, which can totally transform your writing and speaking ability. For example, you can see how great artists like Eminem use dictionaries to search for new words and use them to write great lyrics and rhyme.
Similarly, when you use these words in essay writing, you can actually improve your vocabulary and writing quality. Therefore, it is important to keep a dictionary to guide you to become a better writer and speak English more sophisticatedly. So, you can take different versions of Oxford dictionaries to find unique words to add to your vocabulary and writing.
Improve Your Grammar
Unless you are German, English grammar is comparatively easy to understand. Experts have transformed it into science, where different techniques can help you craft grammatically correct sentences. Therefore, when you write essays in English, you should always pay heed to tense, parts of speech, and active and passive voice.
These things help you craft the correct sentences, which will impress the teachers and the readers overall. Subsequently, you can take up various grammar books and learn the techniques of writing and crafting sentences. Moreover, there are different online platforms from where you can learn grammar and constantly work on it. That way, you will improve your reading and writing ability and build essays like a pro.
Always Proofread Your Paper
The difference between a poor writing piece and the best one is the time you spend on proofreading. That is the way when you can pay attention to your grammar and spelling, which builds the foundation of your essay. For this, after writing, you can read the paper aloud to find inconsistencies in grammar and spelling.
That way, you can improve your spelling and learn to write complex with ease. Moreover, there are various proofreading tools like Grammarly, which will give real-life demonstrations of the issues present in the paper. It will showcase the irregularities in the writing style and look to improve it to make it more refined and crisp. Hence, you should always work on proofreading skills, which can later help you editor of big new houses.
Play with Sentences
To improve your writing and reading skills, you need to play with sentences where you should look to craft new sentences and experiment with them. The more you work on creating new sentences, you can actually expand your thinking power. Moreover, you can stretch your vocabulary and writing quality. For instance, you can look to expand simple sentences and elaborate on them into bigger ones.
It can be like “Roy is studying” you can transform it to “Roy, Christie’s brother whom I met at the party, was studying when I reached their home.” This way, you can add a narrative and build your writing skills and vocabulary. Therefore, you should play with sentences and experiment with the newer ones to see where they go and how they go. For reference, you can take the scene from Dead Poets Society, where Mr.Keatings helps Todd to become a better poet and express himself by seeing what’s around him. Similarly, you can do the same and hone your writing skills.
Organise Your Writing
This is the part where you bring your organising skills into the picture and look to make the paper more crisp and refined. In other words, you need to break your writing into paragraphs or blocks to make it look interesting and readable. The activity strictly falls under the writing activity, where it is important to present your work in an organized way. Therefore, always build a layout of what you will write and then add words and sentences to build it.
Moreover, for every paragraph, you should keep a transition word, showing that one paragraph is adjacent to the other. This will make your paper readable and interesting. Furthemore, you should ensure that your paragraphs are small and crisp, no more than 50 to 60 words. It will increase the paper’s readability score. Lastly, you should keep your sentences within a limit of 20 words, which is a great way to challenge yourself to write more concise sentences.
Get Your Paper Reviewed
Another thing that you should do is get your paper reviewed by your peers and family. This will assist you in improving your writing skills and expanding your vocabulary. They give you an overall assumption of the paper and express the areas where you need to work and improve. Consequently, it will tell you about the space you need to work on and rectify your mistakes.
Hence, you should get your own Gertrude Stein, who will review your paper properly and make a comment against it. That way, you will get more clarity on where you stand and what more you need to do to improve your English writing. So, acquire knowledge and feedback they give you on your writing and try to implement it to make yourself a better writer. Lastly, you also need to have sheer confidence, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who knew they were good writers and kept writing brilliant things.
A True Alchemist Changes World into Words
In the end, you need to live the process of becoming a writer, where you hone your reading and writing skills to add meaning to pre-existing words. In other words, you must build your style and ways to write and connect with the audience. For instance, you can use simple or sophisticated words, but they should have a proper meaning followed by correct grammar and spelling.
Therefore, read books and dictionaries, and watch movies to learn new words to expand your vocabulary and use them in essay writing. For the rest, instructions are provided in the above article, which extensively shows how essay writing can expand your English reading and writing skills. So, begin your journey to find yourself among the Rushdies and Camus of the writing world.
FAQs
Here are a few frequently asked questions –
How can I improve my reading skills in English essays?
You need to build a habit of reading and keep on reading new books, articles, and newspapers, which will improve your reading skills. Furthermore, keep a dictionary to find the words you find in foreign languages while reading.
Which way do you go to enhance your writing skills in an essay?
Here are a few ways to enhance your essay-writing skills –
- Build a writing routine where you write daily. It may be more than an hour or two but write regularly
- Invest in researching the online library to find relevant knowledge from books, articles, and journals.
- Develop your writing style after reading various books
- Edit and proofread your essays to take their quality a level higher.
How to improve your English quickly?
You should invest in reading books and novels. In addition, watch English movies with subtitles to brush up your English.
