And if you’d rather read than watch, here’s the transcript of the video.
It’s Malgorzata from StanagExpert and, in this video series, I wanted to tell you about the five most common mistakes in STANAG 6001 writing and how to avoid them. In today’s episode, I will tell you about the two of the them: the content and logic.
Let’s start with the content. What are content mistakes? Content mistakes are all the mistakes that are connected with what you actually write about in your piece of writing. So, how to avoid content mistakes?
The first very important thing is to follow the task instruction closely. Like really closely. I mean, like point-by-point, word-by-word, taking everything that is written in the instruction literally and following it. What does it mean? For example, use the required functions. What do I mean by that. So, for example, if the instruction says “suggest a solution” then you should use words and expressions that are used for suggesting. If the instruction says “ask for an opinion”, then you should use the expressions and words that are used to ask for opinions. That’s it. OK.
And the next point is sticking to the topic, which people very often forget about and do it unintentionally. For example, if the topic is very interesting to them or they have very broad knowledge on the subject; then they tend to digress a little bit, even unintentionally. So, what to do to avoid this? Well, the solution is simple – plan ahead. Before you start writing, plan what content you are going to place in which paragraph of your writing. All right.
And last but not least is making sure that every sentence in your text is meaningful and necessary, which means that you write only what is necessary in your text. So, try to delete or avoid any sentences that don’t add anything new, don’t add an explanation, justification or example to your text, Just…don’t use them. All right.
And now, moving on to logic. Logic is very important because it makes your text easy to follow and understand by your readers. So, the first and very important thing connected with logic is developing your paragraphs correctly. What does it mean? First, start with a topic sentence. Second, develop the idea from the topic sentence. And third, conclude what you’ve written so far. So, paragraphs, very important. Ok.
The next point is making sure your argumentation is clear, which means that whenever you write something, try to explain, exemplify or justify it. Just, never leave an idea hanging in the air without any purpose or meaning. So, make sure your arguments, your justifications are clear and easy to follow by the reader. All, right.
Connect the ideas with each other. So, this is about using linking words, in fact. So, show how one sentence is connected with another one by showing, for example, consequence, the reason for something, exemple, addition. And that’s what linking word are for.
All right, the next video, as you can see, will be about form and how to avoid mistakes connected with using the appropriate form, but before you go to the next video, I wanted to tell you that if you are interested in learning how to avoid mistakes in your writing in practice, then I would like to invite you to take part in a live workshop that I’m organising. We’ll meet twice a week, very intensive work, for 4 or 8 consecutive weeks. And in our live sessions, we are going to talk about the texts that you will write. We are going to talk about how you can improve your texts and how you can avoid the above described mistakes in your own writing.
So, if you are interested, check the details below, and sign up for the nearest edition of the Level 3 Speaking Writing Workshop.
OK. See you there!
INTERESTED IN THE WORKSHOP? CHECK THE DETAILS BY CLICKING BELOW
