10

A guidelines for writing

Writing as one of the basic language skills is directed at developing and improving students’ communicative abilities. The kind of writing the students are supposed to do depends on what genre they need to write, what writing process they are involved and what writing habits they have.

To be successful in writing everyone needs to plan, draft and edit in that way, even though this may be time-consuming. Students need to see the difference between spoken and written English.

There are some peculiarities in written grammar versus spoken grammar.

Written grammar	Spoken grammar
Sentence is the basic unit of construction	Clause is the basic unit of construction
Clauses are often embedded (subordination)	Clauses are usually added (co-ordination)
Subject + verb + object construction	Head + body + tail construction
Reported speech favoured	Direct speech favoured
Precision favoured	Vagueness tolerated
Little ellipsis	A lot of ellipsis
No question tags	Many question tags
No performance effects	Performance effects including hesitations, repeats, incompletion, syntactic blends, false starts
Verb forms Active / passive tense forms Modal expressions Infinitive constructions Participial constructions	Verb forms Present tense forms outnumber past tense forms by 2:1 Simple forms outnumber continuous and perfect forms by over 10:1 The past perfect and present perfect continuous are rare Passive verbs account for only 2 % of all finite verbs in speech Will, would and can are extremely common in speech.

Besides, students should know that when they write postcards, notes or messages they can leave out a lot of words.

e.g. Weather horrible (The weather is horrible).

Having a great time (We are having a great time).

What is more, the senders of text messages have invented a unique language of abbreviations to save space:

U	You	WAN2 ?	Do you want to…?
HOW R U?	How are you?	2DAY	Today
4U	For you	2MORO	Tomorrow
THX	Thanks	TXT ME BAK	Text me back
L8R	Later	GR8	Great
Y	Why?	CU18	See you later
XXX	Kisses	CU	See you

Each piece of writing usually consists of some paragraphs. A paragraph usually begins with a topic sentence. It is written to make it clear to the reader what ideas are planned to set down and substantiate in this paragraph. It is a kind of one-sentence summary of the entire paragraph narrowing its content to one or two points. The topic sentence has to be followed by supporting statements, which are aimed at proving what is said in the topic sentence. But you should not make the paragraph too long as it can become too tiresome to read. Three, five, or seven sentences at the utmost would probably be enough for one paragraph. A paragraph should end with a concluding sentence. The concluding sentence summarizes the argumentation of the supporting statements, draws some conclusion(s) from what was said in the topic sentence and the supporting statements, and may also provide logical links to the following paragraphs.

The paragraph must be logical, i.e. all statements (sentences) have to be logically interconnected. Logical connectors, sometimes called link-words and expressions, are words / expressions providing links between sentences and paragraphs by language means. These are such words as: first, next, last, therefore, meanwhile, furthermore, nevertheless, on the one hand…on the other hand and others. Using link-words when writing a paragraph is very helpful not only to the reader for whom the logic of what is said becomes clear. They are no less helpful to the writer giving him an opportunity of organizing his own ideas logically.

A very important thing is not to deviate. When writing the supporting statements, you should develop only the idea(s) compressed in your topic sentence. Never let yourself be distracted by different associations generated by your main idea(s). Irrelevant or off-topic sentences must absolutely be excluded. They will only make your paragraph illogical, vague and hard to read.