How to improve fluency and expression in essay wring and just in general.

[yourfriendlyneighbourhoodghost]

Hi,
In English, just general, i can write essays and answer the prompts, but my teacher always gives me the feedback stating I need to work on expression and fluency.
I am not exactly sure how to improve this and when I ask my teacher, they say it is something they cannot explicitly give tips on how to help.

Thanks (:

[Bri MT]

Hey, I find that there are a few different ways that people can run into trouble with fluency:
- their sentences are not fluent
- their sentences don't flow from one to the next fluently
- their paragraphs don't flow from one to the next fluently

Tips for the first case:
- Break your sentences apart into smaller fragments
- Increase your vocabulary so you have more options for words
- Learn/review uses of punctuation
- Learn what the components of a sentence are (this is sometimes more useful for EAL students as they are less likely to haveconfident "it feels right"intuition)
- Try to be more concise

Tips for the second case:
- Learn and use a paragraph structuring mnemonic
- Plan the sequence of ideas before writing paragraphs
- Know what the purpose of the paragraph is and check that your sentences stick to that
- Check you don't have the same small ideas spilt across multiple paragraphs

Tips for the third case:
- Practice making essay plans
- Try writing essays where instead of writing full body paragraphs you just do the plan + first and last sentence of each paragraph - this should be much quicker and will still allow you to check the overall flow of ideas
- Check how well your introduction works - if the body paragraphs don't flow well the introduction might not be great either.


Hope this helps! Feel free to post a sample of your writing for more specific feedback