Studying a Language: Writing

Writing in a foreign language is, in my opinion, a step up harder than reading. It presents the language learner with the challenge of producing the language themselves, pulling together everything they know about gender, conjugations, vocabulary, and tone in one piece of written work. However, writing tasks do still allow the learner the comfort of not having to produce the language spontaneously, as they would have to when speaking. Here are some ideas to practice writing and actually produce written work in the target language.

1. The spring board into writing is reading. Familiarising yourself with how the target language is written will allow you to, in turn, write it competently. (See my post about Reading Skills http://1ofmanyvoices.blogspot.com/2009/12/studying-language-reading.html)
2. WRITE WRITE WRITE. Text your friends in the language (preferably those who are also studying it or this may lead to some confusion!). Find yourself a tandem partner or penpal and exchange weekly emails. Keep a diary or journal in the target language. If you fancy yourslef the creative sort, attempt some poetry, short stories or even plays. Give yourself a topic a week and write however many words about it: your opinion, what's happening, describing it etc. Don't worry too much about correctness, you will find that the more you write the more aware you become of your own mistakes and you will find yourself improving in a very natural, almost subconcious way!
3. For written tasks, make mindmaps or lists of
4. all the key words you would need to use. For instance, if you are to write 300 words about the environment in your area, list or spidergram all the related words in the key language such as 'environment; pollution; recycling; toxic' etc. Find other pieces of writing on the subject and see if they have any interesting turns-of-phrase related to the topic, and try to incorporate them into your writing WITHOUT PLAGIARISING. (stealing someone's work and giving them no credit for it!). Make a list of these expressions and along with your key words tick them off as you write to make sure you've used them all.
5. Try different sorts of writing activities to practice different grammatical structures. Write about your childhood or a past event to practice the past tense. Write about your plans for the future to practice the future tense. Write about your dreams for world peace and a stop to climate change to practice the subjunctive. Write a description to practice your use of adjectives.
6. Use Synonyms. As your language progresses so should you range of vocabulary. I chose a set of key words that often come up in essays (such as 'problem' 'advantage' 'disadvantage' 'opinion' 'create' 'announce' 'said') and found 5 synonyms for each one, and made lists I can refer to whenever I have a piece of writing to do. Not repeating the same word a million times in a piece of work really improves the quality of the writing.
7. Make use of language setting on computers and use spellcheckers. Another good trick to check for spelling mistakes is reading your piece of work from the last word to the first (backwards, basically). This way the words really stick out on their own as you're not reading for understanding.

This post is particularly about the SKILL of writing in another language. I hope they are helpful, and I will be posting a general writing post about academic writing in general...enjoy!