How to Learn English

The most damaging belief in writing is that good writers produce good prose first time. They do not. They produce a bad draft quickly and then rewrite, and the rewriting is where the quality comes from.

Students who believe otherwise experience the badness of their first draft as evidence of inability, and either freeze or hand it in. Separating the two jobs - get the thinking down, then make it readable - removes most of the difficulty. You cannot edit a blank page, and a first draft's only job is to stop the page being blank.

This is presented as a stylistic preference and is closer to a structural rule. Most genuinely confusing prose is confusing because a paragraph is doing two jobs and the reader cannot tell which sentence belongs to which.

The diagnostic is quick: write a four-word summary of each paragraph in the margin. If you cannot, or if it needs an and, the paragraph is doing too much. Splitting it usually fixes the passage without changing a word.

The commonest error in literature answers is naming the subject and calling it the theme. War is not a theme. What a book says about loyalty under pressure is a theme, because it is a claim that could be argued with.

The test is whether somebody could disagree. If not, you have a topic. Once you have a claim, evidence from the text becomes obvious, because you know what you are trying to show - which is why students who struggle to find quotations are usually struggling with an unstated thesis rather than with the text.

Some punctuation is convention and some carries meaning, and it is worth knowing which is which.

The apostrophe marks possession or omission and never a plural, with its and it's the exception everyone trips on: the possessive has no apostrophe. Commas change what modifies what, which is why the restrictive and non-restrictive distinction matters. A semicolon joins two things that could each stand alone; a colon promises that what follows explains what preceded.

Getting these right is not pedantry. Each of them changes what a sentence asserts.

Poetry uses sound as well as sense, and reading it silently discards about half the material. Rhythm, alliteration, the way a line break falls - none of it works on the page alone.

This also fixes the most common misreading of free verse, which is that it has no form. Read aloud, the line breaks are obviously doing work: where you pause, what gets emphasis, where a sentence runs on past the line end and creates tension. The discipline is different, not absent.

Metaphor is taught as a literary device and is actually how abstract thought works. Time is money, an argument gets heated, prices rise, someone is feeling down. None of those are literal and all are unremarkable.

Spotting them in ordinary language makes the literary versions far less intimidating, and it makes you better at noticing when a metaphor is doing persuasive work - which is most of what political language is.

The unglamorous truth is that the highest-return activity in this subject is reading a lot, and the second is writing regularly and revising what you wrote. Everything in this guide accelerates those two; nothing substitutes for them.

If your writing is not working, the problem is usually structure rather than vocabulary. Fix the paragraphs before reaching for a thesaurus.