Better writing - Richard Harrison

Better Writing

Better Writing is designed as a supplement to main course books at the low-intermediate to intermediate level. It will benefit those studying at secondary and tertiary institutions and adults undertaking training as part of their work or business experience.

The author takes a step-by-step approach to the teaching of writing skills. Each unit begins with activities designed to increase awareness of what writing in English involves, and includes practice in mechanical skills (spelling, capitalization and punctuation), the construction and linking of sentences using conjunctions and subordination, and grammatical aspects. Through controlled and guided practice, students are gradually led towards writing accurate, cohesive, appropriate and more interesting paragraphs involving a variety of topics and functions.

These include:

• explaining the functioning of a machine or instrument;
• describing a process;
• describing an object;
• making comparisons;
• describing tables and graphs;
• explaining cause and effect;
• writing formal and informal letters;
• describing change over time; and
• reporting speech and events.

Key Features

Each unit is divided into two sections. The first section includes:

• looking at different texts
• picking out language points
• exercises for practising what you have learnt.

The second section covers:

• sentence building
• ways of joining short sentences together (conjunctions and punctuation)
• putting sentences together to make paragraphs
• punctuation, spelling, capitalization
• checking what you have written
• vocabulary building.