7 Hacks to Improve Your Writing Skills in Foreign Language Through Blogging
Blogging is, in fact, not as simple as it may seem. It can be a great hobby or even a dream job, but having to always be in touch with your audience can be exhausting. In order to keep people hooked to your content, you need to have excellent writing and communication skills.
Since the first blogs emerged, numerous studies have been conducted all over the world to test the effect of blogging on writing. All of them confirmed a positive effect of computer-mediated communication on the progress of foreign language learners.
So, blogging helps! It can be a great means to improve writing skills in a foreign language and make learning more fun. But what exactly should one do? Here are seven essential «how-to» hacks.
Start With Writing on Your Level
Ok, you've set up an account on a blog platform or a social media channel. Wondering what you should start with? First of all, don't rush it. Don't post anything that comes into your mind.
Such brainstorming can be good for creating posts in your native language, but not in a foreign one. If your foreign language skills are below average, think of the linguistic means to express your thoughts with first. And remember: complex thoughts require complex language.
The best themes to start your blog with are as follows.
- A short welcome message.
- Interesting facts about you, your brief biography.
- Short posts based on your everyday life.
These subjects are easy to cover even for a pre-intermediate student. Remember only to say what you know exactly how to say. Short sentences, simple tenses, and a one-thought-for-one-post approach are your best friends at this point.
Find Some Followers
However good and interesting your writing will be, there's a big chance you'll get downhearted if nobody reads reading your blog. So, after you've put out at least some content, try to find yourself an audience. Here are those groups of people who will most likely become your followers:
- Friends, relatives, and acquaintances;
- Your fellow students/classmates;
- Your followers from other blogs and channels that you write in your native language.
When you have your audience, it will become much easier to come up with new relevant themes based on their interests.
Write About Things That Really Interest You
First and foremost, don’t try to make yourself write anything just for the sake of it. Of course, professional writers can deal with almost any topic and write by a brief. Such writers work with EssayPro or similar services, which can help with writing texts on many difficult topics.
And as for your foreign language blog – stick to what really interests you and your followers. But be careful! Choosing only one topic may make you a popular blogger and improve your knowledge of grammar and overall writing skills – but your vocabulary will remain limited.
In order to avoid this effect:
- Think of a range of themes that interest you before starting to write and try to implement them into your blog.
- Write posts concerning the hot news of the day. A wide range of topics is covered in the news, so you get a chance to practice writing on all of them.
Write Regularly
Another essential tip is to keep your blog up-to-date and write regularly. You do have language lessons regularly, right? This is the only way to make significant progress in any task.
If you post on your foreign-language blog once a month, nothing good can come out of it. Without scheduled posts, you’ll lose your followers’ interest, won’t get any significant writing practice, and feel disappointed in your blogging experience.
How to make yourself not skip writing new posts?
- Use visual content as an inspiration. If you have a good photo or video, don’t hesitate to post it with a short comment.
- Make a content plan. Nothing helps to be creative on a schedule better than a content plan. Just write down the interesting topics in advance so that you don’t need to make them up when your muse is sleeping.
- Write at a certain time of day. It may not work for everyone, but in most cases, it helps. Just try to be diligent and not skip this task too often.
Leave and Reply to Comments
Creating your own posts is great, but you can also train your communicative skills via social media by commenting. Leaving comments and replying to them may not give as much space for your creativity, but it helps you to sustain a dialogue. Plus, you can gain followers for your own account while commenting on someone else’s post.
How to make your virtual friends start a dialogue in the comments?
- End each post with a question. This way, people will not have any other option but to comment! If they still don’t, it may be a signal that there’s something wrong with your content.
- Write posts based on relevant topics of the day. Most people can’t wait to give their opinion on hot subjects.
As for finding other people’s posts for you to comment – just search by hashtags or use Google.
Make Your Writing Simple, but Not Too Simple
Readability is a necessary quality for almost any text aimed at a wide audience on the internet. Compare the language of a novel and of a blog post. The difference is obvious, isn’t it?
But writing your posts using too simple words and sentences will make the blog look like a primary schooler’s home exercise. Of course, we’re not talking about the situations when your language level is close to beginner’s – in this case, just do what you can. But if it’s higher, use the following tips.
- Try to use the new words and grammar structures that you’ve recently learned in the classroom. There shouldn’t be too many of them – 1-3 new words and one complex grammar structure per post.
- Don’t be afraid of translation. It’s not a good idea to translate the whole text from your native language, as you must learn to think in a foreign one. But translating some words and sentences will only do you good.
Always Check Your Posts Before Publishing Them
Last but not least, don’t forget a final checkup. Firstly, read the text you wrote from the beginning to the end. Does it make sense at all? Maybe you can find some mistakes by yourself at this point.
If everything seems correct, use professional tools for working with texts to dig even deeper and find all the possible inaccuracies. There are different tools for every language, so use the ones that fit your goals best. From Grammarly to Hemingway, the possibilities are endless.
Wrapping Up
Now you see that blogging in a foreign language is not as difficult as it seems. Just remember that almost nothing is easy in the beginning! Read our hacks once again and start improving your writing skills through blogging right now. And if things don’t go quite as expected, just don’t give up. Remember that it will pay you back with time!
2020年2月13日
