25 Wordy Expressions

Some of my ESL students litter. Their writing. They throw wordy phrases into their sentences like used potato chip bags on the ground. The result? Dirty sentences.

Like litter on the street, there is just too much messy stuff. Students use three words when one word is good enough. I wonder why? Do students think more words are better? I hope the answer is no.

Here is my idea. Good writing is clean. It uses only the words you need to express an idea. No extra packaging. Great writing does not need fancy words. Great writing is a clear idea that is easy to understand. Want to stop littering your sentences? Read on.

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7 Websites for ESL Students

Great Sites for Students

Students often ask how they can improve their English skills. I suggest reading English material. But, they have different interests, not many like newspapers and all of them spend a lot of time surfing the net.

So, I put together links to 7 sites that inform, entertain and build language skills.

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Easy Paragraph Styles

Write English Paragraphs

Writing Skills: organisation, sentence fluency

The other day, I asked my ESL students to read a newspaper story and write a summary.

Their writing was terrible. The grammar was okay, but the paragraph structure was poor. So, I developed a mini lesson to help students understand the purpose and structure of a paragraph.

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Top 6 ESL Writing Mistakes (and How to Fix Them)

I am an English teacher in Korea. Over the past decade, I have read hundreds, maybe thousands, of pages of essays, stories and paragraphs by ESL students. After so much reading, I learned a few things about my students and their writing skills.

  • Students never learned how to write in English.
  • Students repeat the same mistakes.
  • Good English writing needs a different kind of thinking.

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