A Book On Writing

This publication is a self-study book on writing. It is based on the author’s work over many years in English as a Second/ Foreign Language and English for Special Purposes, first in Sierra Leone, West Africa, and  then in the UK.

The book is designed primarily for English language students at an advanced level, i.e. the Cambridge Certificiate in Advanced English, Cambridge Proficiency and those students preparing to achieve approvimately bewteen 6.0 and 7.5 in the IELTS exam managed and administered by the British Council, the University of Cambridge Local Examninations Syndicate (UCLES) and by IELTS Australia. Native speakers of English may also find some aspects of the book of use.

The book has been written from a cognitive, rather than a grammatical, point of view. The guiding printicple throughout is to mimic the underlying mechanisms and thought processes that make up the act of writing. Therefore, it is hoped that if you finish this book, you will remember the mechanisms rather than the langauge and adapt them to suit your own needs.

There are five sections, focusing on the following areas: coherence in a text, cohesion, letter writing, correcting a text and punctuation. All the exercises may be used in isolation, but you are meant to read them as far as possible in sequence.

The exercises are, in the main, designed to make you slow down and think about organisation in written texts. You may find, therefore, that you have to repeat an exercise several times. On occasion, you may even feel the need to use the Key to help you complete a particulat exercise, do not be afraid to do this. The important thing is that you are able to do the exercises with ease after some practice.

One way perhaps to apprach the exervises is to think of them as creating a mechanism for you to absorb the information in the Key. Remember that you are also trying to absorb the mental processes involved in writing. This is obviously much more time consuming, and sometimes more frustrating, than learning bare facts. You should not, therefore, expect to do each exercise perfectly, nor always at the first attempt.

For each exercise in this book, you should read all the intructions very carefully.

As you do the exercises, try not to mark the book so that you can repeat them.

Sam McCarter