Three things I’ve learnt from or with my students this past week

1. That Shakespeare is easier to follow line by line if you translate some of the common differences to current English. For example:

Doth- does

Thou- you

Thy- your

Th’- the

2. Repetition of the same idea multiple times in a draft can be very helpful- by the third or fourth definition of a complex subject, descriptions can start to shed the adjectives which crowded the explanation in the first and second instances.

3. Setting small and visible goals can help guide progress. For example, one of my ESL students is writing about 100 words a week at the moment. The goal is to get them writing 300 words a week by the end of March.

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Two quotes about writing

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

― Anais Nin

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”

― Saul Bellow

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One question

Next time you write a draft of something, does writing one of the complex ideas in it become clearer after writing it a few times from different angles?

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Happy writing,

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Jaye Sergeant

Founder & Lead Tutor of Turtle & elephant

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If you found this interesting, you might also enjoy an interview we published last week with Dominic Wilcox, a barrister in Sydney, about the role writing and critical thinking plays in his work on a daily basis here: https://www.turtleandelephant.com/insight/writing-in-practice---dominic-wilcox 

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