Learn English Paragraph Writing Skills

5 Final copy
Once you have your feedback from your peer review and completed your self-edit, you should write your final polished version using the English academic writing skills you have learned from our handbook.

4 Review and Edit
As with everything we do in life, we check and review our actions. The same applies to your writing. We normally do two kinds of reviews for our writing. The first is a peer review, and the second is a self-edit.

3 Write your first draft
Here you follow your outline to write your draft essay. Write it as quickly as possible, and don't worry about too many mistakes. It's OK to make some mistakes because it is only a draft. You will fix any errors in step 4.

2 Organize
Most students tend to understand outlining, but they fail to understand that outlining is actually a part of the organizing step. Organizing allows you to group your ideas and provide some logical order to your writing. When you organize your pre-writing you follow these two sub steps.

 Look at your list of ideas and group them logically. Circle ideas you want to use. Delete ideas you believe are unnecessary or duplicated.

 Once this part is completed, you do an outline.

An outline helps you organize or arrange your ideas in a logical order. It's like building a house. First, lay the foundations, then build the walls, and finally add the roof.

Outlines can be simple or detailed. We will discuss outlines in more detail in the section on organization.

1 Pre-write
Pre-writing is the first step you use. Pre-writing helps you to get ideas on a topic. In this step, you write down your ideas in any way or form that helps you remember them. There several techniques for pre-writing which we will discuss latter.

Follow the academic essay writing process if you want to write a good English academic paragraph or essay! You must practice and apply each of the 5 steps if you want better grades.

The English Writing Process Overview
You might asking, "Why do I need to follow an writing process?" Well the simple answer is you become a more effective and efficient writer. The writing process establishes the discipline to become a good academic English writer. One who produces outstanding paragraphs or essays each and every time.

The writing process is a simple and easy to follow technique which improves your academic writing skills, and hence, improves your results. As you can see, the writing process has 5 main steps with the 5th being the final copy you submit to your tutor, instructor, or professor.

Types of Sentence Errors

11.3 Comma Splice
Comma splices are also sentence errors. They occur when you join 2 independent clauses with a comma.

For example: Men watch football, women go shopping.

This is a Comma splice. There are actually 2 independent clauses here.

Men watch football.
Women go shopping.
The sentence error should be fixed by either inserting a period and capital letter for women, or making a compound sentence from the 2 independent clauses.

For example: "Men watch football. Women go shopping. or Men watch football, but women go shopping."

There is third way to fix these sentence errors. When you become more proficient with sentence connectors you could have used "Men watch football, however, women go shopping."

11.2 Run On
A Run on is also sentence error. They occur when 2 independent clause are joined together incorrectly.

For example: Men watch football women go shopping.

This example is a run on. There are actually 2 independent clauses.

 Men watch football.

 Women go shopping.

The sentence error should be fixed by either inserting a period and capital letter for women, or making a compound sentence from the 2 independent clauses.

For example: "Men watch football. Women go shopping." or "Men watch football, but women go shopping."

There is third way to fix these sentence errors. When you become more proficient with sentence connectors you could have used "Men watch football, however, women go shopping."