Writing Strategies & Stories

Keeping your purpose in mind can help a lot with getting started on your writing. Are you writing to tell someone about some news? Are you writing just to express some feelings in a journal? Are you writing an essay or story for a class? Are you writing an email or a short text to someone to arrange a meeting? All of these choices involve different styles and definitely have different implications for how much you review and revise your writing.

Similarly to the point above, what you write depends a lot on who you are writing to, and why. The question of genre pops up again here. Are there expectations that the reader will have about your writing when they read it? For example, if you are writing a news story, the reader will expect to have the key facts of the story near the beginning of the text. Or if you are writing a paragraph to show your ability to use the past tenses to your teacher, you will want to review that grammar carefully before you turn it in. If you are writing an analysis of a piece of literature, your reader will expect to see a clear thesis statement in your introduction. If you are writing a text message, you may want to be careful to include the emojis that help signal your attitude or emotion.

Depending on your goals, making a plan usually helps to achieve them! Again, SMART goals can help you really pin down your goals, but even simply having a routine of writing in a journal in the morning or night, or giving yourself extra time to revise for important assignments, reflects the power of the metacognitive cycle.

You can also take some time to plan out what you will write as well, for example with an outline or mind-map, especially if it is a longer composition that needs to be coherent as a whole.

Remember the benefits of multimodality! Visuals of what you are writing can be helpful in so many ways. Just as you can draw a mind-map to plan your writing, you can use a mind-map to help revise something you have already written! By drawing out the main ideas or logical progression of what your essay says, for example, you can see if it flows well and makes sense.

And if the genre allows it, you can create or include illustrations or designs that enhance your writing as well. Most readers love to see visuals (which is why we tried to include a lot of them in this book)!

As we have said before, if you are taking a language class, take full advantage of it! Especially with tasks involving writing, the teacher is there to give you feedback and structure, and you can ask the teacher lots of questions. People who are studying independently often don’t have such easy access to writing feedback or practice with the different genres that a class provides.

By keeping a journal, you can frequently practice writing in a casual, low-pressure environment. This is an opportunity to practice daily-use language as well as practice writing about any specific topics you are learning about, but don’t feel ready to discuss with others yet. Writing in another language can be an interesting way to explore emotional topics as well, since strongly emotional words usually have less impact on us in another language.

If you make frequent entries, this is also a good opportunity to see how much you have grown over time. The first page of your journal is likely to look dramatically different than the last, and this can be a huge encouragement at times when you don’t feel that your language skills are improving.

Freewriting is a way to increase fluidity in your writing in any language. Allow yourself to write without worrying about mistakes and accuracy. You will notice that while practicing freewriting, you brain might keep switching from one language to another. That’s okay, embrace all your languages and do not hold back from writing words in different languages while writing in your L2. Welcoming translanguaging in your writing will help you gain confidence and  engage with your learning creatively.

Milo, a past LING 144 student, wrote a free-form poem that captures the fluid nature of thoughts in writing and how translanguaging enhanced their creativity and clarity of expression in writing.

There are many ways that you can find or build an online community among writers of your L2. This community could be made up of people from a language class you attend, friends you’ve made online, an online group that is already arranged in your town/city, or an online gaming community.

You can create group messages or talk individually with members of this community, use one another as resources, or negotiate meaning and nuance of vocabulary and grammar. This also may open up the opportunity to talk with speakers who use different dialects or other proficient speakers of the language who can help to guide you on your language learning journey, and offer you additional tips based on their own experience.

Do you have a roommate who is also studying French? Leave little handwritten notes for fun! Do you have a grandparent who speaks your heritage language? Send a text or email using the language (they will probably really appreciate this, knowing how grandparents are). If you really want some regular practice, use an app like Slowly to connect with other learners around the world who are using your L2.

If you are writing something that needs to look good or be clear to your reader, getting help from someone else can help you know if it makes sense, flows smoothy, or has errors or typos that you missed. Although editing tools can help with this too, having a real person look at your work can be a fun way to learn with another person and get a real person’s point of view. If you’re taking a language class with a friend, take advantage of what you are both learning together to strengthen your goals of language learning.

Tutors or friends who are very proficient in your L2 and willing to help you with your writing can also help you by reformulating some of your writing. Reformulating is when someone rewrites your ideas in a way that is more typical or natural for a very proficient or native speaker. Reformulating doesn’t focus so much on errors or typos, but on elements of voice, cultural expression, and common word collocations in the language. You can look at the differences between your own writing and the reformulated writing and discuss them together. Be sure to only turn in your own work if this is an assignment that is supposed to reflect your current independent abilities, however.

When Keli Yerian (the faculty lead on this textbook project) was learning French in college, she had a French roommate for one year who helped her reformulate some of her writing assignments to show her how she would have expressed some of the same ideas. Keli loved the discussions she had about the language and felt she was improving a lot by doing this. However, one day her French teacher took her aside and questioned whether Keli’s writing was independent work. Keli was embarrassed and at the time was unable to explain how much she was learning. She was careful to only submit the work she did independently afterwards, but continued to learn from her roommate in parallel.

Is quickly dashing out an essay on your phone in bed really the most comfortable for you? Think about what would make writing more pleasant and motivating for you. Try to find a special corner in the library, on the lawn, or near a window in your house that makes you feel ready to write.

Budget in the time to look back over your own work to see how much you can improve your own communication without relying right away on digital tools to help you. Can you independently notice changes you would like to make?

If you carefully read your own writing aloud, you will often catch awkwardly written sentences or errors much more easily than by just reading silently. Listen to what you are reading, and see if the rhythm feels right, the length feels right, the words feel right, and so on.

Digital writing tools available on the web can help you find typos, errors and unclear places in your writing. If you use these tools, use them to learn rather than to just do the writing for you! Notice if you have patterns of errors that you could learn to fix on your own. We recommend you use these tools only after you have tried to revise your own writing yourself first. Also, remember that digital tools can be biased or even wrong in terms of the voice and variety it is using. Always use the tools mindfully, and never use them to write for you when your independent writing is expected.

This strategy should not come as a surprise to you by now, but we still have to list it! When you’re first trying to get your ideas down on paper, try doing it without stopping to edit your work. Although this isn’t true for everyone, stopping to wonder, “Is this the right conjugation?” or “Is this exactly the right word?” can derail you from the flow of your thoughts, resulting in accurate grammar or words but less interesting and coherent content. Try just writing what comes to mind at first, using the language that you already remember, and even using your L1 now and then to fill the gaps. You can revise later!

This might sound like the opposite advice as reformulation, but they can actually go hand-in-hand. As L2 users, we sometimes come up with very unusual and creative ways to express our ideas that native speakers might not think to say or write that way. Although these unusual expressions might look “wrong” to a proficient speaker, they also can look unique and intriguing, and they might just work sometimes! If you like the way you expressed something in your L2, ask others if it still makes sense to see if you could keep it.

Learning how to handwrite in another writing system is getting less and less common, but it is also an embodied way to connect with the history, culture and feel of the language. There are many templates you can find online for practicing the new script through tracing the lines.

One of the best ways to improve your writing skills in your L2 is to read often in your L2. Sometimes you can be quite intentional while you are reading to take note of the grammatical and vocabulary choices of the author. Reading gives you an opportunity to expand your own lexicon and turns of phrase. You can notice and use sentence structures, vocabulary, figures of speech, and anything else that you like to try it out in your own writing.

When learning a language with a different writing system, mnemonics can be a helpful tool to help you memorize characters. For example, Japanese character い is pronounced like the “ee” in “eel” and looks like two eels swimming around each other. Even though mnemonics don’t work for everyone, for many they can dramatically increase the speed at which we can learn a new writing system.

One of the best ways to use writing to learn vocabulary is to simply try communicating about something in your L2, see where the gaps are in your own knowledge, and keep a vocabulary journal about it so you can review these new words later. Are you trying to write about a favorite food and don’t know the word for an ingredient? While revising your writing, look up the word and write it in a vocabulary journal (which might be a physical journal or might be a file on your computer or phone). It’s likely that if you want to use it in your writing, it’s something you will want to remember later. Focusing on words you actually need can be more motivating and memorable than memorizing a random list of vocabulary you might need someday in the future.

The languages you already know are your friends in language learning! Don’t try to ban them from your thoughts if they come to mind first. Just notice them and feel free to use them if the L2 words don’t come to mind. This is your brain translanguaging, in other words using all the resources it has for communicating meaning. You can look up the L2 equivalents when you get the chance, and revise your writing at that point. Eventually the L2 words will also come to mind easily, and your translanguaging will become more intentional rather than necessary.

Translanguaging is both fun and empowering. Below is a poem written and translated by Faith when she was taking LING 144. Like Milo’s poem above, it shows how powerful translanguaging can be to communicate both literal and deeper meanings through multiple languages.

An alternative to translanguaging or looking up a word when you don’t know or remember it is to simply use the words you do know to describe it, what we call circumlocution (‘going or speaking around something’). For example, you can describe what it looks like, what it sounds or feels like, or what it’s used for. A fork can become, ‘the think you eat with that has four fingers’. A song can become ‘music with words’. A dinosaur can become ‘a very, very big animal in the past’. Skiing can become ‘going down snow on a hill’. Circumlocution can sometimes be even more interesting, poetic, or memorable than the word you were searching for!

Texting is naturally full of weird spellings and errors, so your L2 errors will fit right in. Interpersonal mode is far more tolerant of mistakes than presentational mode, so let yourself make them, as long as your writing still conveys your meaning the way you want!

It’s easy these days to add keyboards from other languages on your devices. This can help you easily find the symbols you need for your L2.

When you have your L2 keyboard, you can notice what it suggests for autocorrect as you type or text. Often autocorrect includes suggested words that are the most expected next words, and in this way it helps you use and learn common collocations (words that tend to go together statistically in the language). It also gives you the expected conjugations of verbs based on the rest of the prior sentence.