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.

English writing teachers

I took three English writing-related courses at Tamkang university this semester. One of my classmates said that I am a WWW (three writing classes) student this semester. Once I took three writing classes, I found writing is the most difficult skills among the four language skills. Of course, you have more time to construct your ideas, edit your drafts, and make multiple revisions; however, the most challenging part of writing to me is that you should be careful about what you write, for it is black and white (or 0 and 1 in this digital age). Therefore, people can retrieve it and any obvious errors will be easily spotted. Speaking, on the other hand, has different challenges. In most situations, we do not have time to organize our ideas or rehearse it before we speak out. Nevertheless, you can "deny" your errors unless someone talk to you records your conversation.
The other day, one of my classmates asked a question in one of my writing classes. I think it is a pretty good one. She asked whether we English teachers should become good English writers before we can teach English writing. That is to say, can we teach English writing if we can't write English properly? Think about this question if you are an English teacher. I will talk about this issue in my later postings.
I will try my best to write something and post it on this blog, probably a couple of postings every week. Let's see how it works.