This article is continuation of my 90 days challenge to improve my English through writing. My goal with this challenge is to get better at writing complex articles in shorter period of time and to keep track of progress as well.
In this article I am sharing my experience with different methods I have tried to get better at writing articles. Although I haven’t followed any of them rigorously but still I would like to share my few cents on what method I found to be best among all.
Watching relevant video content
As I spend most of my time on youtube, I prefer watching the relevant videos that would help me to improve my English speaking as well as writing skills. I watch a lots of podcast and self improvement videos not only for the self help but also for learning how to frame sentences and use appropriate words in the right context. Although I would say this is quite helpful in the sense that it expose you to new words and useful sentence structure to use in day to day conversation but the drawback is its hard to retain them for a long period of time because I watch most videos only once.
Listening to audio books
Listening to audio books has the same impact as watching video content but provides better and well organized content than most of normal ones. The amount of vocabulary I am exposed to is much larger and complex which are quite helpful in the sense that it provides more context on when to use the word and the major benefit is familiarity it provides when watching or reading any form of contents and articles. Personally the major drawback is I find it quite disturbing to stop the videos and search for the meaning of the newly encountered words then play the videos again which mostly makes me forget the context of the word so I have to rewind it.
Reading books
Reading book is one of my favorite thing that I do in my free time as they give me the sense of achievement and expose me to authors views and opinions which help me in self development a lot. Thanks to the various pdf reader which makes searching for the vocabularies easy by providing with features like web search and in built dictionary. Books are very well organized and articulated in a fashion that makes engagement and interaction much better than some videos content. The drawbacks of this method is books are filled with lots of useless fluff too that just makes reading more tedious and disinteresting.
Spending time reading reddit comments
I would say this one is the best among all other method due to the fact that I get to explore lots of views and opinions on any topic which are coming from professionals and experts too. The best part about this one is people uses words and sentences that sounds very natural mostly because of fact they uses them in their day to day life so it just helps a lot in having them in my arsenal. The drawback of this method is sometimes views and opinions shared causes confusion and chaos to an extent where its hard to understand whose opinion to follow as they are structured and articulated in such a way where opposing as well as supporting views seems rational.
Writing on random topics
This is the new one which I am trying out by writing these articles so I cant say much about its efficiency but I can clearly say this one is the hardest and most engaging of all of them as it requires continuous thinking and focus to come up with the right sentence and word. The best part about this method is that it is an action oriented approach so it helps me in clearly navigating through the mistakes and weaknesses that I need to work on.
My experience writing this article
I had the same experience writing this articles as the previous ones which is I had to think a lot and re edit many times before I could come up with the right sentence to express my views clearly. I am satisfied with the results as I am in the very early stage of writing and the exposure I am getting over my weaknesses and mistakes will be highly helpful in improving this skill in the long run.
Time it took me to write this article
I expected the time it would take me to finish this article to be somewhere close to 2.5 hours but was able to finish it within 2 hours and that’s pretty good to me.