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Do You Often Find It Difficult To Write Things? Like Emails, Letters or Essays?
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.