Boosting your writing skills
<div>How to do you take your writing to a next level? Anything that has worked for you? I'm stuck as I feel like I use the same vocabulary again and again.</div><div><br></div><div>Please share your thoughts and experiences.</div><div><br></div><div>Thanks!</div>

<div>Hi Kia,</div><div><br></div><div>Something that I <em>really </em>recommend and that students often don't think of doing is using <strong>models</strong>. Depending on the type of writing you want to focus on (emails, academic essays, exam writing tasks, letters, articles...) look for a high-quality piece of writing in that particular style and analyse it.</div><div><br></div><ul><li>How has the writer structured the text? Have they used linking words? How?</li><li>What grammatical features have they used? Do they use the passive or active voice? Which tenses have they chosen? Do they use conditionals? Noun phrases?</li><li>Are there some sentences that you can "steal" and adapt for your purposes? Emails, for example, contain a lot of quite formulaic language that you can use again and again (I'm writing to you in reference to...; Please confirm....; Please let me know as soon as possible whether....). This is a very useful exercise and you can do it with a lot of writing tasks, including articles and essays. The important thing is to try to look for interesting <strong>chunks of language </strong>(phrases) rather than individual words.</li></ul><div><br></div><div>There are lots of great resources available online but feel free to get in touch with me if you'd like some advice!</div>

<div>Search How to write a perfect essay</div><div><br></div><div>There are millions advices and tips there ...</div><div><br></div><div>Good language schools like IELTS provide really nice and useful materials with some examples</div>

<div>Make a list of the words you learned recently (you can categorize them by grammatical category, ie nouns/idioms/verbs etc, if that will help you), then try to use them as much as you can in your writing. You can Google "essay topics/prompts" and choose from lots of argumentative/narrative/expository topics people post online to write about every day, trying to use the vocab you recently learned.</div>

<div>Thanks a lot everyone for your insights. </div>

<div>Instead of writing in order to use particular words, just write whatever is interesting to you at the time and find the vocabulary to do this.  Some of it will be useful for the future and some less so.</div><div><br></div><div>@Elena    'concern' - this could be a useful word, both as a verb and a noun</div><div>                 'strive'   -   not a word that is often used in everyday conversation</div><div>                 'convict'  -  again, not one you are likely to need, either as a verb or a noun</div>