Post 6 (Last Post): Experience in Online Classes

  The following are some guidelines for you to write on the topic.

Firstly, just to remind everybody, this topic is the result of a collective reflection and discussion given during our week's session and as a group, students have decided on the topic of.

 "Experience in Online Classes"

You have to develop your piece of writing freely in 450 to 500 words.

In order not to model your writing, I am going to skip writing about it but instead I am going to give you some highlights on what to and not to do:

6 Tips to Improve your Writing.

Several times I have been asked this question "What would you recommend to improve my writing skills?" and well, certainly most of us have already been to the position of being a bit lost in the sea of words trying to carry out a certain piece of writing for work or studies, for that reason, in this post I will try to summarize in 6 tips some of the advice I have been constantly giving to many students over the 14 years I have been teaching as a Language Teacher.

Some of the advice I will give you in this post might at first seem to be of common sense. Yet, here they are:

1- You should consider clarity in your writing, and all clarity in the text will come along with you having your thoughts put in order, and a clear idea of what you are going to write about.

2- In order to show clarity in the message the first thing to do is to start by organizing the content, i.e. your ideas.
In organizing your ideas you will be organizing your text, a good way to begin with is to start by exactly knowing:
•         Your topic: what the blog is about.
•         Your argument and point of view: what you will end up saying about the topic, what you are aiming at argumenting with the text, so for example in this short piece of writing my aim is at giving you hints on how to write a blog with clarity.

•         Your outline. The outline shows the structure of the article, so you will need to know what points you will talk about so you could say “I am going to discuss 3 issues” (say), in such way you do not expand too much over unimportant matters.

3- After having a good perspective of the text, start writing. In doing so keep in mind the introduction. You want the reader to keep on reading, therefore a good idea is to make it interesting and engaging. Some techniques are: to tell a short story or a joke, being empathetic, or catching the reader with interesting facts, statistics, testimonies or so. Then you just need to hold their attentions, so a good idea is to provide the reader with several examples and engaging hints all along the text.

4- The fourth tip is, after you are happy with your “catchy” introduction, go onto clearly describing the purpose of the post and also how it will address the issue. Try to link it with the reader in terms of a situation they might be also experiencing; this will give the audience empathetic reasons to carry on with the reading because it will give a sense of connection to what he or she are going through in their lives.

5- After you feel pleased with what you’ve written, let it sit for a minute and then get back to your it because you’re not done yet (you’re close to, though), now it comes the editing process.

Proofreading and editing your post is as important as the organization of it. In this part of the writing process, do not forget to check on any new words spelling, also on the subtleties of words meaning since you want to be consistent in your writing. Which leads me to the final bullet point I would like to highlight.

6- And as an end to this post on Tips for writing, I have to finish with some words over the concept of consistency because, having in mind that we are writing a blog we need to consider that some words, will be related to this “register”, while some other words will be related to, perhaps more formal, legal or professional matters.

The advice is then, that you check on most of the new lexical items you may be using, to check those new words in monolingual dictionaries and also to find examples of the words in context so as to make sure the words you are using are not too technical or complicated. Remember, we want to be CONSISTENT with the type of text we are writing.

 

Bonus: And since I just mentioned the format and register, it is not bad to ring bells on the use of visuals in a blog. Do not forget to choose your visuals well, either an info-graphic or a picture might produce good effects to your text, it will make the post more appealing and keep in mind that sometimes, showing works a lot better than telling.

 

I hope these tips serve you in your writing of this Final Post within the second pandemic term of this 2020 but furthermore I hope it serves you improve your writing as a whole.