Writing in English
Why I practised writing before speaking, and the three-step loop I use.
⏱ About 5 min read
I neglected writing for almost two years. The reasoning was simple: my goal was to speak, so writing was secondary.
Looking back, that was a bad calculation. Writing is the cheapest and least frightening way to start producing English of your own.
Why write before you speak
You have time. Speech has to come out in a second. Writing lets you think, revise, look things up. The first sentence you ever produce should not be one you produce under pressure.
You can see your mistakes. Speech evaporates. Writing leaves the error sitting there, rereadable and countable.
It forces active recall. Listening and reading only need recognition. Writing makes you pull words out of your own head, and that is when you find out which words you actually have.
And it transfers straight to speaking. The sentences I wrote over and over about myself, my interests, my job — later, when speaking, they came out ready-made.
Start with three sentences
Start small enough that there is no excuse to skip it.
Three sentences a day. About what you just watched, just ate, or were just annoyed by. They do not have to be good.
Prompts I use when stuck:
- Summarise the episode you just watched in 5 sentences.
- Three things you did today, one sentence each.
- One thing you disagree with, and why.
- Explain your job to someone outside your field.
Write from ideas, not from Vietnamese sentences
This is my most important rule for writing.
If you compose a Vietnamese sentence and translate it, you get sentences like "I very like it".
What I do instead: hold only the idea, then ask "how did people in that show say this?". If no structure comes to mind, write a simpler sentence. A simple correct sentence always beats a complex translated one.
The three-step loop
Writing with nobody correcting you just reinforces your own errors. This is the loop I use.
1. Write, no lookups
Write straight through. Where you don't know a word, leave a gap or drop in your own language and keep moving.
This step measures what you actually have available in your head.
2. Reread and self-correct the next day
Leave it a day before editing. Edit immediately and your eyes still see what you meant to write, not what you wrote.
Now you can use a dictionary, check collocations, and revise freely.
3. Get it corrected, then take the errors to Anki
Have someone correct it. Only collect the repeated errors, not one-offs.
An error that shows up three times in a month deserves a card. A single stumble does not.
Step 3 is the decisive one. Without it, the first two steps are just writing for fun.
Who corrects you
| Option | Upside | Downside |
|---|---|---|
| Online language-learning communities | Free, real people | Slow, uneven quality |
| A language model | Instant, unlimited | Tends to over-polish; you have to ask well |
| A paid tutor | Systematic, remembers your past errors | Costs money |
A tip for machine correction: don't ask "fix this paragraph". It will rewrite it into something far better than you could produce and you will learn very little.
I ask like this:
This is written by an English learner. Only correct what is wrong or what a native speaker would not say. Keep the voice and the difficulty level. For each correction, add one short line explaining it. Do not rewrite the paragraph.
That last sentence is the important one.
Where Vietnamese speakers commonly slip
These are the errors that took me longest to fix, and I see almost everyone make them.
- Articles. Vietnamese has no a/an/the, so I either dropped them entirely or sprinkled them at random. This was the last error I fixed, and mostly through reading volume rather than learning rules.
- Plurals. many book, two child. Vietnamese nouns don't change form.
- Tense. In Vietnamese, time lives in đã, đang, sẽ — drop them and the sentence still works. In English the verb has to change.
- Dummy subjects. "Hôm nay trời mưa" has no subject. English requires one: It's raining today.
- Adjective order. a red big car sounds wrong to a native speaker; it should be a big red car. Nobody memorises this order, but read enough and it starts to grate.
Volume or care
I split it in two, the same way I split the two modes of reading.
Volume writing — the three-sentence journal, comments online, notes. No editing, no lookups. The goal is to loosen up and get faster.
Careful writing — one ~200-word paragraph a week, run through the full three-step loop above. The goal is to find your repeated errors.
Volume without any careful session and your errors freeze exactly where they are.
Sources for this page
- Nation, I.S.P. (2007). The four strands. — writing belongs to the "meaning-focused output" strand, one of the four you need. See also The four pieces.
- Nation, I.S.P. What should every ESL teacher know? — a free short book; the chapter on writing is brief and very practical.
The section on common Vietnamese-speaker errors is my own summary from my own journal, not research data.