Develop a habit of writing English

I just read an article titled 'Writing IS Thinking'. The author, Kerry Ann Rockquemore, a tenured professor from Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago challenged readers to write 30-60 minutes each day. I have to admit that it is pretty difficult for non-native speakers of English to write 30-60 minutes each day. However, being an English writing teacher, I have to convince myself that I should develop a regular habit of writing English, for example 2 pieces of blog every week.

Let's start from writing issues. To many people, writing is the most difficult skill of the four language skills. Why? There are many quite a lot reasons and I would only talk about two of them today. First of all, many native speakers of English have no problem communicating fluently in English, but they may have hard time writing well-organized essays. I bet it is also true to many Chinese people; people who can get their ideas across in oral communication can not necessarily write a convincing article. Since writing will usually leave something for others to check what they wrote is good or not -- an email, a printed writing assignment, a technical report, a chapter of a book, etc, writers should be more careful about the sentence structure, grammar correctness, and word choice of their writing. Second, because writers usually don't have to respond immediately as they did in conversations, they have more time to organize, draft, and revise their writings. In other words, most people may expect more meaningful content from your writing than from your speaking.

Yes, it is not easy for native speakers of English to have a habit of writing English, not to mention non-native speakers of English. However, I bet once we cultivate the habit of writing English, we will write faster and better.