Need advice on improving writing style

[Musicgold]

Hi,

I am a non-native English speaker and need some tips on improving my professional writing style. My job involves writing analysis of various economic and financial events and my career growth is in jeopardy as my writing style is not as professional as my English speaking colleagues.

To explain you about my level of English writing, I have easily passed exams like TOEFL and IELTS, and comfortable with different grammar rules.

My problem is I get stuck with sentences which I have never constructed before. I don’t understand how to explain a situation in sentences that are easy to understand but don’t sound awkward.

As for my efforts to improve my writing, I have tried two methods:
1. Writing a page on some topic everyday.
2. Noting down unfamiliar sentence constructions in whatever I read.

The problem I found with the first method is the review of what I write. I don’t know anybody who can review my writing for me everyday.

With respect to the second method, I have collected 70-80 pages of unfamiliar/ new sentence constructions so far ( in a Word document). However, I don’t know how to leverage this database. I can’t read all of it in one setting, and just use the collection to look up for examples.

Could you please suggest me some methods that can help me in improving my professional writing?

Thanks,

MG.

[Jamie (K)]

In my opinion, the best way to improve one's writing and speaking in that type of situation is to do massive amounts of reading in your professional field and other fields, without taking a lot of notes or "studying" it too much. You should start with things you don't have too much trouble understanding, and as your reading fluency improves, then you should read more and more difficult things. Concentrate more on what you understand than on what you don't understand, but just read and read. In the ESL teaching field this is called "extensive reading", and there are whole courses consisting of only that.

The reason knowing grammar rules and studying lists of unfamiliar expressions isn't that effective is that your brain needs to see words, expressions and constructions again and again, in many different contexts, before it can use them effectively. It may seem that simply by reading you're not really doing anything, but you're feeding your brain with more and more material that it processes in your subconscious, and it all eventually comes into active use. In the end, both your speech and writing noticeably improve.

I did this myself with other languages before I actually knew it was common practice in the language teaching field, and I've convinced friends to do it when their English was stuck. Within a month there was a great deal of improvement. I think that if you can read 25 or 50 pages a day of relatively unchallenging text, you'll see the improvement start in a few weeks.

[Musicgold]

Jamie (K),
Thanks. I have begun working on your advice.
MG.

[Jamie (K)]