When I was a child (yeah, I am getting old so I always start with “when I was …), I wrote diary in Chinese for school assignment. Although most of the journal notes were fake stories, they at least forced me to write something, and it happened that my writings were often posted on the bulletin board as exemplary articles. They were not brilliant or heavily decorated, but were generally considered clear writings.

I hadn’t written anything serious since I entered the college. But, not bragging myself, my writing skills gave me pretty good scores in most courses, particularly social science courses. Therefore, I was dismayed to discover that I could not write well in English.

In fact, I was disappointed of myself so much that I unconsciously refused to write anything. I didn’t feel confident in my language skills. So I procrastinated, and waited for a really long time.

Well, self confidence, or self-esteem in general, is a personal trait but can be improved. The first strategy to build up self-confidence is to master the technique through practice (see self-efficacy theory by Albert Bandura).

But mastering English is not easy. Some suggest reading extensively, and some promote listening and speaking. But I found that writing is the best strategy to improve my English.

Writing has many advantages. First, writing is a basic skill in the modern society. For an academic researcher, you need to write lots of things: letters, emails, papers, and reports. Writing is essential to survive in the academics.

Second, unlike reading in which you receive information passively, writing is an active process. When you write, you consciously think about the language. You have to figure out the precise words, correct sentence structure, and logical idea flow to form a coherent paragraph and eventually an article. It is a project under your own control.

Third, the more you write, the more language subtleties you can see. During writing, you put your thoughts on the paper. You pay more attention to the sentence structure and style. You can rearrange paragraphs to better reflect your ideas. Yes, it is true that writing takes more time than oral practice. But it is not always possible to talk with other people. Talking also requires you to form sentences quickly. Therefore, sentences in oral conversation tend to be informal, fragmented, and sometimes incoherent within conversation.

Fourth, as learning theory goes, writing reinforces the learning when you put what you’ve learned onto the paper. You can experiment new words, new phrases, and new style. Only after you have used it does the new knowledge become your own.

Finally, writing can help reading and speaking. By writing clearly in English, you are likely to think clearly in English. In this sense, it is good idea to write in a way you will talk, not the casual style, but the formal talk. You can imagine you are giving a lecture in a class or an oral presentation in a meeting. The words and sentences you are using should be clear enough, and the message should be straightforward to be understood by general audiences. If you can write like that, you will be able to speak like that.

Even given so many advantages of writing, it is still difficult. As I said before, writing is time consuming. When I first started writing blog, a 600 word post might take me more than four hours to finish, and there were still numerous errors in it. The concern of time in writing sometimes leads many people to stop the whole writing practice.

Furthermore, it is not always easy to find a good topic to write about. There are many things going on in the world everyday, but not all of them that you are interested in or willing to spend time writing about, let alone doing research about it. To write a good post, sometimes you have to read many background materials, which requires extra time.

In addition, writing itself may be a frustrating process. You may be stuck in the beginning of writing. You have no idea what is going to be the next. Or even worse, you don’t know how to start. This is what people call the “writing block.” To break the block, the only thing you need to do is to write whatever comes up in your mind. Later on you can rearrange them and figure out the right thing you are writing about.

The language differences between English and Chinese may also impede your writing progress. Chinese focuses more on context with little modifiers among phrases, while English requires logic development within both sentence and paragraph. The extensive grammar things such as articles, tense, and consistency further demand down-to-detail detections. Errors from these, unfortunately, always trouble me and make me embarrassed.

In the era of web blog, everybody can become a writer. And it seems there are so many. Studied found that 50% teenagers had blogs or webpages. Many scientists started blogging too. For example, James Hamilton has set up a blog on oil consumption, and Bob Delong has a blog on political economics. There is also a statistics blog by Andrew Gelman in Columbia University. Needless to say, many netters I know of also have their own blogs.

The common trap in writing blog is that you may wish other people to read your posts. After all, you have spent several hours to write something. To say the least, other people should appreciate your effort. I have this kind desire too when I started blogging. I advertised it in places where I think people might be interested in my writings, and thankfully they did encourage me a lot. However, everybody is busy, and people don’t have to read your posts, especially when your posts are likely unpolished. People go online for fun, not to correct your English.

Having secret admirers is certainly nice, but now I am writing for myself. No matter whether the posts are good or bad, interesting or not, I just force myself to write something regularly. My main goal is to improve my English in addition to expressing my opinions. The posts themselves are my reward.

Set up a blog and keep typing. Writing is difficult if you don’t write.