Video Discription |
Learn 1 simple trick to write ANYTHING easily - you can use this for emails, essays, letters, reports, etc. Also see - MOST COMMON MISTAKES IN ENGLISH & HOW TO AVOID THEM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dax90QyXgI&list=PLmwr9polMHwsR35rD9spEhjFUFa7QblF9
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Transcript:
Do you often find it difficult to write things?
Like emails, letters or essays? Do you sit down
to write something and then realize you don’t
know what to write? If your answer is yes, then
this lesson will help you to overcome exactly
these problems because I’m going to teach you a
very simple trick that you can use to write
anything easily, quickly and effectively. This
is a process used by the best writers in the
world and it’s called the POWER writing method.
You can use it to write emails for work, essays
for your English exam, you can use it for
letters, business reports, blog posts, stories –
basically, anything that you need to write. But
you might be asking – why is it called POWER
writing? Well, POWER refers to the five stages
of the writing process: Prepare, Organize,
Write, Evaluate and Review. This is the order
you will follow and it will allow you to write
without getting stuck by focusing on one task at
a time. So let’s start with the first stage –
prepare. Before you write anything at all, you
must prepare for it. This is because the reason
we often struggle to write is that we don’t have
enough ideas when we put pen to paper. So the
most important task of writing is to come up
with good points before you write. So this is
the very first stage – before you write a single
sentence, you’re going to collect ideas. And
here’s how you do it: You take your paper and
pen (or you can do this on your computer if you
wish), and you note down anything that comes to
mind. Don’t criticize your ideas – don’t leave
out or discard anything. Whatever you get, write
it down. Don’t worry about organizing your ideas
– we’ll do that in the next stage. Also, don’t
worry about grammar, spelling or punctuation –
remember we just want ideas so if there are
mistakes, no problem. And keep doing this until
you have no more ideas. As an interesting note,
this process of coming up with ideas is called
brainstorming. OK, let’s look at an example of
how to do this. Let’s say you’re in an English
exam, and you have to write an email of
complaint. Here’s your task: You recently
purchased an item online, but you are not happy
with it. Write an email of complaint to the
manager of the shopping website: say what you
bought, why you are not happy with it, and what
action you expect them to take. So let’s start
by collecting some ideas for this. So what kinds
of things can we buy online? We can buy clothes,
we can buy computers, phones, books and so on.
Let’s think of some more specific ideas – I like
computers, so let’s talk about them. You can buy
a laptop. Actually, you can also buy computer
parts like a monitor, a mouse or a keyboard. For
this task, I’m going to go with a mouse because
it’s easy. Now if I bought a mouse, what
problems might I have with it? I think the most
common one that people face is with one of the
two buttons – let’s pick the right-click button,
but you can also have trouble with the scroll
wheel – that’s the wheel in the middle. So I
bought a mouse and maybe just two days later,
the right-click button started having problems.
But I’m going to say that now it’s been a week
and the button has just stopped working. You can
see that I’m just using my imagination. I want
to add some more details, so let’s say the
scroll wheel is also having some problems. What
problems can it have? Well, if I try to scroll
in one direction, it actually makes the screen
go the wrong way. So we have our problems now.
But what do we want the shopping website to do?
We can say give me my money back – that’s called
a refund, or we could ask for a replacement. I
like that idea. Now when they give me a new
item, they will want the old one back. So I’ll
have to return the defective unit. That means
the mouse that’s not working. Alright, we are
done collecting ideas. And here in just two
minutes, we have all the information we need to
write our email. Notice that as I was
brainstorming, I came up with lots of ideas – I
collected everything that came to mind without
leaving anything out. And then I expanded on the
important ideas. It can be very helpful to talk
out loud during this stage like I was doing –
try to have an imaginary conversation and you
will find it easier to generate ideas. Also,
it’s good to use paper and pen for this exercise
rather than your computer. |