How to improve your writing

[technobabel]

Writing is more permanent than speaking. Besides one can reach more audiences with writing. On certain level, speaking is more entertaining and amusing than writing, but speaking has its limitations. It is fairly apparent that Yoyo is more about speaking than writing. That is not necessary a good thing.
Why you write is just as important as how you write. Given a choice, I prefer to write than to speak. But it is not easy to catch people attention with casual writing. We all have better things to do. Why read and write when we don't have to. Let's give our brains a needed rest. That is perhaps an easy way out. It is fun to see words flows from your brain and on to the screen. Writing is thinking out loud; a theraputic process that is often overlooked.

Question: Why do I write?
Ans: I write to keep myself from being insane.

[technobabel]

Chances are, words just do not flow like poetry in our feeble minds. It is easier for Bill Gates to make you rich than for Shakespeare to improve your writing. What am I trying to say? Your guess is as good as mine.

[brooky]

Thank you for sharing your precious opinion.
People want to write something for different reasons.
Read and write is really not a preferred way of communication in such a fast society,
while a good article is always more impressing, touching and even everlasting to me.

In my case, English writing is far from a delight before I become capable of doing it.
In fact, I encounter some problem in dealing with my writing task recently.
Maybe I can share something with you after I somehow learn from mistake in this field...

[technobabel]

My earliest writing class was back in 10th grade in high school. It was a very small class of no more than 3 students. The class's main purpose was business letter composition, more precisely, C2B, not B2B types of business letter. Assignments often includes writing a simple letter to various organization to either complain or requesting info. The main point is to be polite and professional. Not to mention that the letter paper had to be folded correctly. This is all before the era of email. Typewriters were still quite common at the time. Few years after that, I started seeing people throwing all kinds of typewriters away, some of them weighs a ton.

[brooky]

Ha..ha..at least we know that the writing class in American is very practical..teacher will not always ask students to write some old cliche, which always turn out to be useless bullshit eventually..^^

[technobabel]

Before the proliferation of emails, organizations took personal letters from determined individual some how seriously. Hopefully, they still do. American citizens are known to influence their senators and congressmen thru letter writing. Corporations also took letters from consumers seriously. The idea is to prevent small misunderstanding from becoming a big problem. Teachers still encourage their student to write letters to their president and governors. Perhaps it is an American tradition. Politicians have no choice but to "welcome" and respond to these letters, afterall they are the public servants.

[technobabel]

It took me a while to learn how willing Taiwanese today wants to communicate, and at what level they wishes to communicate, and I am still learning. If I happened to listen in on a conversation on the bus, in a restaurant, or on an MRT, thru their tone of voice, contents and other tell-tale signs, I can almost ascertain the kind of life, comfortable or not, that they have now. But, things are seldom what they seemed.

[David_Liao]

Lots of members know that I should negotiate with my clients either pursuading the seller cutting the list price or the buyer gaining their budget. This year, sueing clients is much more common than it used to be. Communication? Yes, I think sueing is another level of communication but I really don't like that.

[technobabel]

Casual and creative writing is a reflection of one's resourcefulness and determination, regardless of external encouragement or discouragement. By the same token, what about all the English learners in Taiwan? How are they motivated, Internally or externally? Most just learn enough to get by, only a few ventures beyond the very edge.

[TarzanMan]

You have it backwards. Only the basics of learning to write English are important. Learning how to speak the language properly is a much more useful tool for communication (which is the reason we all learn foreign languages).

If you are trying to communicate with a friend, or business associate then proper, spoken English will be the medium 9 times out of 10. Even in situations where it is necessary to write English, then it is acceptable to simply write what you would have said (as long as you know how to spell).

Written English has its uses as well, but it is sometimes impossible to learn the dynamic, fluid usage of terms and words from static written phrases on a page.