The Strategies of English Writing.doc

英语写作策略the strategies of english writingcontentsabstract.1key words.1i. introduction.2ii. the function of english writing.42.1 capitals.72.2 commas.72.3 ellipsis.72.4 excessive punctuation.72.5 headings.82.6 hyphenating prefixes.82.7 numbers.82.8 quotation marks.82.9 spaces.82.10 tables.8iii. the approaches of english writing.8iv. conclusion.12reference.13the strategies of english writing摘 要：英语写作是英语学习中非常重要的组成部分。要想迅速并有效的提高英语写作水平通首先需要打下牢固的语言基础，即相当程度的语言造诣、良好的语言修养和敏锐的语言感知能力。写作者必须懂得写作的具体步骤，了解写作的性质，掌握写作的技巧。更为重要的是，学生还必须解决用英语思维的问题。过对于英语各个方面的学习认识提高到英语写作的目的。其次，正确的引导学生对英语写作策略的学习并且深入的掌握其规律，提高对于写作的认识。改变旧的写作观念获取信息策略后完善自我的写作策略。本文从论述英语写作的意义出发，着重分析了英语写作中常出现的问题及解决途径。旨在鼓励教师培养学生英语兴趣，提高学生英语写作的能力。关键词: 英语写作;策略;转变;能力abstract: component that english writing is very important in english study. to think rapid and active to raise that english writing standard is led to firstly need to conquer the secure language foundation, with name laying the language perception ability of the fairly language attainments and good language accomplishment of level and sharp. write the concrete step that author must understand the writing, and understand the quality of writing, and grasps the skill of writing. the more important is, and student still must solve the issue with english thought. study crossing as for each aspect of english is known raising the purpose to english writing. next the correct leads the study to english writing tactics of student and his law of control going deep into, and raises knowledge as for the writing. changing the past writing concept procures the perfect writing tactics oneself behind the information tactics. this text, article, etc. sets out from the meaning to discuss english writing, and stresses analyzing the question that english writing has averagely appeared and solves the way. aim at encouraging teacher to cultivate students english interest, and raises the ability of students english writing.key words: english writing; strategies; skills; change.i. introductionsince we have spent a lot of time in learning english, it is wise to ask ourselves: how have we spent our precious time? among all the english skills, which one has taken the most time from us and which one the least? does the allocation make sense? you probably would agree that most chinese students spend the majority of their time in memorizing vocabularies or studying english grammar while the least in practicing spoken english or writing. chinese students emphasize on vocabularies and grammar because they think it is the most efficient way to quickly acquire high scores in the toefl or gre test (although i can make a very convincing argument against it). but what are important in taking tests may not be useful in applying to schools, handling heavy homework, and working as a professional in the future. in real life situations, the importance of different skills may have ranks as the following:writing: most important in application and at workplacespeaking: most important in interviewingreading: critical for finishing your homeworkunderstanding of grammar: useful only for taking testsvocabulary: all you need in life are 3-4 thousand wordslet me use an example to show you how different writings can have dramatically different effects and why you need more time to practice it.one of my friends graduated from singh university and is extremely intelligent and technically capable. once he showed me a paper analyzing the success of mcdonalds in china. here is the first paragraph:” as all know, china is famous for delicious food. food in china from different areas is so different. when mcdonalds decided to enter chinese market in 1987, many people doubted whether mcdonald would succeed in china it was the biggest fast food retailer in the united states. you know, fast food is not as delicious as chinese food, and chinese people like to eat and pay attention to the taste of food.what is your impression about this person from his writing? you probably wont think he is a good researcher who is going to say something insightful about mcdonalds in china. it has a causal tone and is disorganized. but if you read carefully and try to see the logic behind it, the following is really what he wants to say: china is famous for the richness of its cuisine. with its large number of cuisines, even the ordinary people choosing from a variety of dishes for their daily meals. in such an environment, when mcdonalds entered china in 1997, people wondered: will mcdonalds succeed with basically three selections - burgers, french fries, and coca - on its menu?now what is your impression about this person? he is right to the point of contrasting the rich choices of the chinese cuisine vs. mcdonalds biggest weakness. as a person, he is sharp and probably is going to say something interesting and insightful. we can draw two important observations from this example:(1) writing is extremely important because writing itself tells who you are and could have profound consequences. if you ever have a chance to read many chinese application essays, you will have the impression that the majority of the applicants are arrogant (read a false impression to see how chinese students are making them sound arrogant) and uncreative as they are talking about the same thing - they are smart and diligent. if an applicant gives admissions officers such an impression - arrogant and uncreative, i suspect that in some cases, the admissions officers will throw away this kind of applications immediately.(2) writing can be dramatically improved without using any fancy vocabulary or complicated sentence structures. all you need is a little bit more practice and change the way you allocate your time in studying english. the results will be impressive.after i completed my last are you writing enough, zhang krishna, wrote me an email commenting on the article. i think krishna would agree with me that practice does improve your english writing. so, are you writing enough?i stated the following: the gap between the ability to just explain and the ability to explain well is as wide as the gap between the image of an authoritative, stubborn, aggressive, and inhuman china and that of a progressive, reasonable, normal, and gradually more humane china.” well, that is about speaking in front of others and about thinking on your feet. as i have pointed out in yesterdays article, different writings can have the same kind of drastically different effects. an intelligent person can give others a rather dumb impression with badly written essays while an average student can stand out among her peers with good writings. again, here is my story: following jeffs instructions on my writing, i was addicted to getting help from my american classmates, especially from those who are excellent writers with enormous patience such as noah, lisa, and paul. sometimes, i spent my whole weekend in their apartment studying and playing with them just so whenever they had time, they could look at my essays. they did exactly what jeff had done to my writing. i loved the way they taught me as i had never been trained in writing in such a fashion before. and the training was paying off my efforts too. during the semester that i was the only chinese within my department without an assistantship (read the american sensitivity), i had to wait tables on both saturdays and sundays in an extremely busy restaurant. so naturally, i could hardly finish the heavy readings required by some of the courses.ii. the function of english writingone course required reading three thick theoretical books in economics, sociology, and political science, and an additional one filled with personal interviews and social investigation. they were so difficult that even americans were complaining. meanwhile, the professor was known for his toughness in grading his students. soon, two of my chinese classmates dropped out. my situation looked even worse as i could barely finish half of the readings even though i was trying my best. however, for whatever amount of reading i had finished, i was able to write relatively well-organized and convincing papers, which made our professor very happy as he must have had too much headache with essays of most chinese students. amazingly, i passed!later, whenever i wanted to show appreciation to my american classmates who helped me with my writings, i always joked: i dont think i should thank you guys, but professor h should because you have taken a lot of headache from him by helping me. some of those who didnt get an a joked back saying: oh, i wish i were a chinese student.interviewing, discussing issues in public, doing presentation, or thinking on your feet require tremendous experience and practice. before you have many opportunities to do it, writing is probably the best way to build your communication skills. it helps you enormously in school application, visa obtainment, work, personal relationship, and eventually success and happiness. so practice it!on the very first day of my very first class as a teacher, i asked my students a very naive question: why is writing such a difficult thing to do?the complaints came bubbling out of my students, and i was not prepared for the volume or substance of their grievances. in lather, i spent the entire class hour writing their concerns on the blackboard. when the black board was filled, we wrote more complaints on pages torn out of my notebook, which i thumb-tacked to a wall of the classroom. when the hour was up, we all sat numbly still, staring at this overwhelming sea of bad news. after the students had filed me out of the classroom, i wrote down the contents of the blackboard in my notebook, collected the pages we had tacked to the wall, then went back to my office where i locked myself in. suddenly, teaching students how to improve their writing seemed like an impossible task.in many ways it is impossible, because the learning never ends. there is no such thing as the perfect writer because there is always something more to learn, another skill to master. even now, no matter how hard i work to strengthen my writing, there is always something i cant do as well as i would like. my grammar skills are still weak and i still struggle to find the best structure for each of my writing efforts. until very recently, my writing was horribly disorganized.but my writing has improved and most of that growth can be attributed to this embarrassing confession: i started to practice the process skills i had been preaching to my students. i started to listen to my own advice.writing is so much more than simply taking a piece of paper and a pencil and scribbling away. there are so many things i need to take into consideration before i make my scribbles. i have repeated the exercise i did in that first class in every writing course i have taught. i find it interesting that there are a few core complaints my students have about writing which show up on the blackboard every time i do the exercise. what i would like to do now is introduce these core grumblings to you and talk about how this course and this computer program intend to make these concerns more manageable. do you recognize these? do you harbor some of the same complaints about writing?think back to the last time you wrote something for a teacher in high school. how did you go about it? what steps did you go through to produce the essay? no, let me guess.and, you waited until the very last minute to write the damn thing. the essay was due monday morning but you waited until sunday night at about 9:30 pm or later to sit down and pull the assignment out of your notebook. you did think about the assignment during the week and on friday night you didnt enjoy the party, the beer or the company of your friends as much as you wanted to because you had this anxiety, this creeping suspicion that there was an important school assignment waiting to ambush you when you arrived home. you swore then that you would lock yourself in your room on saturday until it was finished.you awoke sunday morning (what happened to saturday?) feeling like death and facing the real possibility that you might not be able to finish the essay on time. you loitered through breakfast, read the comics, and even started to read the newspaper article about a new cure for some disease with the latin name students procrastinate this. with a groan you rose, shuffled into your room, locked the door and sat down to work.you cleaned your room. you opened the door just wide enough for you to hear the raider game your mother was watching in the living room. you needed a break so you took the dog for a long walk. when you returned home, dinner was waiting for you. you ate slowly. you re-read the article on students procrastinate this . after you ate four cookies and helped with the dishes (a very rare event) you retired to your room, determined to have the essay finished in time for you to watch the x files. you browsed through two or three old issues of people magazine looking for ideas. you tore a piece of paper out of your notebook, coughed, licked the end of the pencil, then began to think and write at the same time.if this sounds at all familiar, dont feel too much guilt because even accomplished writers work this way, suffer from various forms of students procrastinate this. relax. for now im not going to rant on about time management. no. this section of the program is concerned with what you do after you lick the tip of the pencil, not what you do before you sit down to write. in this section i would like to introduce you to a few simple strategies for developing an idea, creating a manageable focus for your writing before you shape the finished essay. trust me on this: much of your success and effectiveness as a writer depends on the quality of the writing you do before you write the pre-writing steps you take before you begin to sculpt your text.due to bad writing habits, laziness or a critical hole in their writing instruction, most students skip this pre-writing step completely and then wonder why their grades are so scary. i acknowledge that this is not always your fault. even though there is a greater consciousness now about the importance of this pre-writing work, many college writing instructors still dont introduce these strategies to their students because they assume that they were taught to the students in their high school writing courses. to make matters worse, many of us crusty old folk were never taught these approaches during our own schooling, so we dont even think about employing them or teaching them to our students. im a case in point. when i was a student, i was expected to take a piece of paper and a pen and just write away. as you probably know, that approach can be torture, because it asks you to do the composing and organization of your writing in your head as you go. then, several years ago, i went through a renaissance of sorts in my writing and teaching thanks to workshops that i took from some of my more recently-educated, up-to-date colleagues. i am proof that, at least when it comes to writing, you can teach old dog new tricks. you can install a new set of writing habits. as a proofreader of business writing, i see many of the same errors made again and again. errors in your writing (be they in advertising copy, correspondence, or a web site) are more serious, i believe, than most people realize.why? well, the standard of your writing has always been important. today, though, more than ever before, first impressions count we are bombarded by the written word in its many forms books, pamphlets, magazines, signs, e-mail, web sites and many other media.we are all suffering from information overload and are forced to find ways of screening out as much as we can. we thus tend to make quick decisions on what to read and what not to. first impressions increasingly determine what we read and what we dont, and poor writing leads to a poor first impression. the following list of tips should help you to avoid some of the most common slip-ups.2.1 capitals:avoid the temptation to capitalize words in the middle of a sentence just to provide emphasis like this. if you want to be more emphatic consider using bold face, italics, color or larger text.2.2 commas:the most common use of the comma is to join together short sentences to make a single longer sentence. we do this with one of the following small joining words: and, or, but, yet, for, nor, or so. for example:we have finished the work, and we are looking forward to the weekend.notice that the two halves of this sentence could each be sentences in their own right. they thus need to be separated with a comma and joining word. in the next example, though, we dont need a comma: we have finished the work and are looking forward to the weekend.the halves of that sentence could not stand alone, so no comma was used.2.3 ellipsis:the ellipsis is a series of three - and only three - full stops used to mark missing words, an uncertain pause, or an abrupt interruption. avoid the temptation to use six or seven dots - it looks amateurish. for example, we write:niles: but miss fines age is only.fran: young! miss fines age is only young!2.4 excessive punctuation:only one exclamation mark or question mark should be used at a time. consider the following over-pu