Writing workshop (and) 29

This is our twenty-ninth and last installment in our writing workshop. Throughout our posts we have intended to make students familiar with some techniques and we have also tried to raise their awareness about specific writing formats and tasks they may encounter in an exam.

Posts 1 to 9 of the workshop are based on basic writing techniques and have a universal value. This is very useful advice we can follow if we want to write well, inside and outside the class, as English students and in life. The ideas on the posts are mainly taken from Feedback, a Cambridge University Press writing course that despite its age, it was published in 1994, it is as valid today as it was when it first came out.

Posts 10-13 list a number of connectors that may come in handy when writing compositions, when dealing with any sort of task where we have to write complex sentences or when we speak and must link sentences together. In many respects,  these posts are also a good opportunity for grammar revision, as some of the connectors listed are closely related to specific grammar points to express condition, result, cause, and so on. They are mainly taken from another great book we can still find on the market, Successful Writing, intermediate and upper-intermediate, Express Publishing.

Posts 14-28 are intended for students at an intermediate level who must sit an English exam with a composition writing paper. More specifically, they were written with the Escuela Oficial de Idiomas  Intermediate cycle exam in mind, and especially for the distance –That’s English!- students, as they must work at home and are often lacking in a tutor’s guidance about specific aspects of the exam and how to tackle them.

Posts 14 and 15 focus on the different types of tasks and how to understand them.

Post 16 makes a summary of the most relevant aspects of all the information published on this writing workshop up until that moment.

From posts 17 to 28 we focused on task formats that demand the students know specific conventions and formulas that may have a key influence in the overall mark:
Post 17: Informal letters/emails
Post 18 Formal letters
Post 19: Letters of complaint
Post 20: Writing a character reference
Post 21: A letter of application
Post 22: A letter of advice
Post 23: A letter asking for advice
Post 24: A letter to the editor
Post 25: A report
Post 26: Expressing your opinion
Post 27: Expressing a balanced argument
Post 28: Problems and solutions

In some of these posts, especially in 26, 27 and 28, some specific writing techniques were also touched on.

There many other types of writing tasks we haven't explored:
Description of people, places, buildings
Description of festivals and events
Writing stories and narratives
Writing reviews of films, books, plays, concerts, CDs, websites

We have decided against dealing with them here because their occurrence in the exam so far has been marginal and because, let’s face it, however much we try to “fence in” the written task, reality always proves itself impossible to cover.

I always say in class it’s easier to win the lottery than guess the composition topics in an exam. It is an exaggeration, but my point is, and the point we have tried to make on the blog is, that technique is very important, and technique, together with inspiration and our grasp of English, can help us sail through whatever written tasks we are faced with.

We know that some of the content in the writing workshop would have demanded a more detailed explanation, with practical activities and composition samples, but that is ground that overlaps a teacher’s task and that students should explore on their own if a teacher is not at hand, or with the help of some of the reference book we have mentioned here.

Just before the Easter break a student, who was badly pressed for time, asked me how he could make headway in English without devoting too much time to it. I am afraid to say I don’t have the answer for that, but if this is your case and you badly need some quick guidelines for composition writing, I think that posts 3 and 16 will do it for you.