Easy Writing Activities

by

Here is a short list of easy ESL writing exercises to help students learn and improve their English writing skills.

Writing Activity #1  Murder Mystery

  1. Review a true story about a man who was killed. The slides are here.
  2. Do a short pair work discussion to review the key facts and undercover missing elements.
  3. Write a persuasive story to describe what happened. Put the facts together. How did the guy die?

Read more

ESL Writing Lesson: How to Write and Format an Email

by

This is the last week of new content to help ESL students learn English writing.

Email Writing Research

  1. This slideshow provides basic data about email messages.
  2. Here is an email which I sent to many hotels in Korea. Some of the answers I received are here.

Dear Sir/Madame,

I’d like to get some information about rooms and availability at your hotel.

I have two adults and one teenager traveling to Seoul. They need a room for two nights
on May 26 and May 27.

1. Do you have rooms available on those nights?
2. What are the rates and taxes?
3. Do you have wheelchair access?
4. What is the best way to travel to your hotel from the airport?

Many thanks for your help and information.

Rob

 

PROFESSIONAL EMAIL WRITING

Writing an effective email in English is not difficult. But my students need to learn a few basic writing skills.  This lesson will help them in the future, especially when they start looking for a job and need to write emails in

Read more

Ideas to Improve Writing Style

by

ESL student writing – especially narrative and descriptive pieces – can be flat, dull and homogeneous.

Overuse of simple verbs is one problem that can fix that style problem. Tired verbs like be, find, go, say and see are easy to write in proper. Sure the sentence is grammatically correct but writing is a lot more than just good grammar, ain’t it? Sure, it gots to have style.

Here are a couple of exercises which I uncovered in a terrific book, 500 Word Theme by Harry Kroitor and Lee Martin (1994).

Editing for Style: Tired Verbs

Read the paragraph. Pay attention to the tired verbs (e.g. be, can, go, etc). rewrite the paragraph.

bug-2The Volkswagen is unexcelled for dependability.

Read more