Michelle's independent resources for ESL Students at Vancouver Community College

This is a Canadian ESL blog for Intermediate and Advanced Students who want to learn and improve their English. Each PAGE above contains thousands of free English lessons, tutorials and practice exercises to help you learn and improve your English grammar, reading, listening, pronunciation, speaking, writing and editing. Some of the resources are Canadian. Others are from around the world.

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Writing

Welcome to the writing page.

Read the article and watch the video before you start anything else. 

Major Writing Centers with Many Writing Resources 

  • Guide To Grammar and Writing   The biggest and best known writing and grammar site in North America. This site has four major sections to help you with grammar and writing:  The Sentences,  The Paragraph , the  Essay and the Research Essay. Each section includes tutorials and practice activities that are helpful to ESL students.
  • The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue 
    One of the biggest and best known online writing labs in North America. This site has information to help you with all aspects of writing from the basic prepare to the research essay. It also has grammar and mechanics practice particularly aimed at  higher level ESL students.
  • The University of Victoria Writing Tips Page                                                                The first section details all aspects of the writing process including, pre-writing methods, planning and organizing your writing, dealing with main ideas and support, outlining. You can also practice working on coherence, unity, revising a first draft for content,. coherence and unity. 
  • Sentence Sense: An online textbook in basic writing that offers a lot of interactive online exercises and tests. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 focuses on how sentences work by themselves and within the paragraph. Part 2 focuses on common errors in written English. Part 3 focuses on writing techniques and topics for writing
  • Garbl's "Fat Free" Writing Links Garbl's Fat-Free Writing Links is an annotated directory of websites that give advice on cutting the fat from your writing--so your readers can easily chew, digest and be nourished by your top-choice words. Also available here through my association with Amazon.com are several books that provide excellent advice about concise writing.



THE SENTENCE:
 Sentence Combining

Sentence Transformation NEW
There are many ways to say the same thing in English. These exercises will give you practice changing sentences to different forms without changing the meaning.



THE PARAGRAPH 



TYPES OF PARAGRAPH  

TOPIC SENTENCE: ( MAIN IDEA) 
 SUPPORT: DETAILS: GENERAL VS SPECIFIC : 

ORGANIZATION: COHERENCE AND UNITY 
TRANSITIONS


COHERENCE PRACTICE ACTIVITIES 

 The CONCLUSION 

Working with key words in writing: Agree/Disagree

NARRATIVE WRITING:

DESCRIPTIVE WRITING 

ESSAY WRITING:  

 Writing Outlines 



 Guided Essay Writing Practice

THE ILLUSTRATION ESSAY: 


GIVING INSTRUCTIONS: 

THE CAUSE EFFECT ESSAY






STUDENT WRITING SAMPLES:
Note: These student writing samples are only meant to be used as examples to show you how to approach different topics. 
Please do NOT copy these writing samples and pretend that you have written them. This is CHEATING. Stealing someone else's work and pretending it is yours is called plagiarism . It is dishonest in the west, and students can fail or get kicked out of school for doing it. Also, even though you think your teacher will not notice, you are wrong. Teachers will immediately know it is not your writing because they already know what your writing is like. Finally,this kind of plagiarism is very easy to detect by doing a simple internet search. 
 

Applying for a Job 
SAMPLE IELTS LETTERS 

Formal Letters 

Semi-Formal Letters
Complaint to a Landlord




The TWE ( Test of Written English) for TOEFL  

Practice Writing Assignments:

Proofreading and Editing:

If you want to improve your writing and learn how to reduce the number of mistakes you make, you must practice proofreading and editing. 
Proofreading means looking for and identifying grammar, punctuation and spelling mistakes.
Editing means correcting those errors. 

To practice identifying and correcting mistakes ESL students commonly make in their writing go to the EDITING AND ERROR CORRECTION PAGE.  You will find many tutorials and practice activities at identifying and correcting specific mistakes and mixed mistakes

Two essential skills you must learn when you trying to improve your writing are proofreading and editing.

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