Writing a diary to help your english
- 1. Writing a diary to help your English How could writing a diary help you? Do you need to practice tenses, linking words, using new vocabulary? How about articles, prepositions, adverbs, adjectives, punctuation? Paragraphs? Of course you do. Writing helps consolidate learning and with a diary, you can choose to focus on specific areas you need. Also, I believe a diary can provide a link between accuracy and fluency as you’re writing your thoughts in spoken-English style, but you have time to think about the language you’re using. Look at this diary entry: Diary entry Tuesday 11 November Today, I got up early, so I’m absolutely exhausted. I had breakfast: two slices of cold toast and a disgusting coffee, then I left the house at 8 o’clock still feeling half asleep. Honestly, London’s killing me! It was raining on the way to school, so, as a result I got soaked and by the time I reached school, I was sneezing. Anyway, I arrived at 8.45 and looked over my homework before class. I’m still having problems with using the present perfect accurately, but I learned 5 new body parts
- 2. yesterday including the names of all the fingers (thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger and little finger), which I’m really happy about. Lessons were great as usual but it’s hard to concentrate sometimes because of that really good-looking girl in my class. After school, we went on the social programme trip. It was the pub and I chatted to the good-looking girl. I think I’ll go on Saturday’s trip if she goes too! Does it use the language features mentioned above? Look, for example at the tenses. Does it use past, present and future tenses? Now look at the highlighted sections. Without them it would be a rather boring description of the facts, but these phrases add value. They link ideas, show cause and effect, comment, give structure and add interesting detail. So why not give it a try? Here are some of my top tips for approaching your exciting new diary. Imagine you have an audience; a friend, NOT a teacher! Why am I telling you this? Would the reader appreciate detail? How did I feel? Is the sequence of events clear?
- 3. Remember, a higher level writer or speaker adds value to the facts using the above ideas. .