And, welcome back. In today's lesson, we are looking at writing an article. So, this is for all you writers out there who want to get your work published. Writing an article might be a very good first step in helping get that objective achieved. So, article writing is an excellent thing for professional people to do to try and raise their profile, whether it's publishing it via a website like LinkedIn, putting a link there, or any other sort of trade-specific website that will provide a platform for you for sharing your expertise and unique take and unique kind of insight into stuff you know about. So, what I'm going to do in this lesson is kind of guide you through a step-by-step process to creating an article, and then in the second half of the lesson, we'll be looking at how to transform a rather dreary paragraph into something much more satisfying to read. So, first thing you need to do is choose your subject material. It needs to be something you really know about. Maybe you have first-hand experience of it, because, you know, why should we be reading what you have to say if you don't know about that topic? Do it about something you know. Try and make people think, so take an unusual angle on something rather than just saying what everyone says about something. Where are you aiming to get it published? Because that should influence the way in which you're going to write it. So, if it's for a local town website, then it's not going to be as perhaps sophisticated as a Ph.D. discussion platform on nuclear physics. Then you kind of need to brainstorm your points, and I've got a separate lesson on brainstorming, but just write down all the things that you could possibly say about this topic. And then it will be a case of crossing out anything that's repetitive, unnecessary, uninteresting. Nope, nope, nope. This is interesting. That's interesting. And then maybe expand on the ones that you think sort of pop out as being interesting. The next stage is to sort of plan the order in which you're going to write the points. Your first paragraph really needs to have a lot of impact, needs to grab the reader's attention. So, probably you want to put the most important point there in that first paragraph, but think how the article's going to build from one point to the next, there needs to be a coherent, an understandable structure. Then once you've got your plan, what I like to do is actually kind of for each paragraph sort of put sub-points. So, I'm going to say this in this paragraph, I'm going to say this, this, this, then the next paragraph, like, just like three ideas to make sure that when you're actually writing your first draft, it's like you've got a skeleton and you're fleshing it out, okay? But the better it will be to read, the better planned it will be from point to point, there should be a nice flow to the article. This is probably the most difficult bit, the first draft. Once you've got something to work with, then it's much easier to sort of play around with it and edit and improve and cut sentences and - but you've got to get - you've got to do that difficult step of, you know, writing the first draft, and the better the planning, the easier that is. The more you know about the subject, the easier it is, the more stories you have, the more facts at your disposal, the easier it is. You should check that your facts are accurate, especially if it's some sort of, you know, article on a particular sort of academic topic or a particular sort of research topic, you do need to make sure those facts are right, and then just leave it, yep. Close the file, put the book away, have a break from it for a week before you come back, you know, and then you should find that you have a fresh perspective. You can see it again and go, "That doesn't make sense there. How do I make that make sense? I need to rewrite that sentence. There's no link between the first and the second paragraph, so I need to find a link there." At some stage, you should find a short, snappy title for it that's going to get your readers to go, "Ah, yeah, yeah, I want to read that." So, I was thinking of writing an article - I'm actually a dog owner myself, but I was writing - thinking of an article that someone who does not like dogs, being in my local town park, would write, and I was thinking of a title of, like, "Who Let the Dogs Out?" Because that alludes to a song, "Who let the dogs out, who, who, who, who?" So, if you can reference something else or if you can have a rhetorical question or if you can have some alliteration where you have some repeated sounds, like, "Dangerous daredevils destroy deanery" or something, deanery being where a dean lives. Not sure why they would do that, but never mind. So, we've taken a break, we've come back, we've improved it, then we're starting to rewrite it. Superfluous means anything above what we need. So, if we don't need it in there, take it out, cut it back, make every word count. And then, when you have finally got it into a place where you're like, "I can't make this any better", then, if you're part of a writing group, that's the point, to take it along to your writing group and read it out, although normally they're looking for fiction, but take it to someone who you trust as being very good at English, who can help you, give you some more feedback on your writing. And then, once you've put in any incorporated, yep, that means put into practice any feedback they may have given, then you need to submit it, send it to that place where you identified here as being your - where you want to get it published. Send it off. Send it off to a couple of different places, and then get some feedback from them, and then either improve it or move on to your next article. Okay, let's have a look at some writing. So, thinking about writing a kind of article that might be published on a blog site about professional interests, I thought I'd base this idea for an article on going to a high level conference, but this particular piece here has not followed the advice that I gave on the previous board, where I was saying plan, plan, plan. You can tell that each thought is just kind of like, "Oh, what should I say next?" and write it. Yeah, it's not paragraphed, it's not - doesn't expand any of the points, and consequently the person runs out of ideas after just a few sentences. The vocab is not particularly good, the grammar is accurate, but it's not written in an interesting style. Let's have a read. I went to the conference and it wasn't very good. Why not? I thought it was going to be interesting. Why? Why did you think that? When I arrived, I didn't know who to speak to. Now, what the student is doing here is doing "show" - is doing "tell" rather than "show". So, they're just presenting information, they're not describing the information. I've got a separate video on how to do "showing" rather than "telling". The displays weren't very interesting. Now, the rhythm of each sentence is exactly the same, because each sentence is the same sentence type. Well, we've got "I went to the conference", yeah, simple, so this is - this is a compound sentence because we've got two ideas. I thought it was going to be interesting. One idea. "When I arrived, I didn't know who to speak to." Actually, we've got a complex sentence there, because we've got a sub-clause. The sentence makes sense without that phrase there. The displays weren't very interesting. Again, just a single idea. Main clause. The displays weren't very interesting. A clause is like a phrase with a verb that makes sense on its own. "I thought they could have used technology a bit better." Again, it's kind of the same length of sentence. "There wasn't really anything interactive, so I left." Hmm. Reading that, I'm underwhelmed. There's no - there's no descriptive detail, the writer hasn't taken me on a journey anywhere. Okay? So, I often work with students to try and improve their writing, and I might guide them into writing a bit more like this. Now, bearing in mind that the article hasn't been planned and we're trying to transform something quite mediocre. "By 9.01, I had gained two grey hairs, wasted three euros on lukewarm coffee, and had taken an oath", which means a serious promise, "to never again brave the Paris metro before 10 a.m." So, what we have in this sentence is a rule of three. Yep. So, we've got "I'm never going to do this", "I'm never going to do this", and "I'm never going to do this again". It instantly kind of draws you into the writing. By 9.01. Hmm. Why 9.01, not 9 a.m.? And it's quite a complete sentence. By 9.01, this, and then before 10 a.m., there's a kind of a symmetry here. At 9.02, so my sentences are linking together. 9.01, 9.02. "I pretended", now, if you look at the vocabulary, it's higher level, "lukewarm", it has more descriptive detail. "To brave" is quite a rare verb to use. "Pretended" is not a verb we use all the time. "Enthralled", "to be really excited by", again, not a very common verb. At 9.02, "I pretended to be enthralled by Steven, a computer programmer, who I had been unwittingly", that kind of means like it's not very good luck, "paired up with for the", should be a "the" in here, "the cringeworthy break-the-ice activity." So, I'm setting a scene, yep, I'm taking, I'm asking the reader to imagine this situation. I don't just say, "It was bad, so I left", I've got to describe it, I've got to make it real for the reader, and then I'm probably going to go into my point, so what is the point of the article? Conferences should be better organized, why aren't more resources pumped into them? And then, exploring my list of points in the order I've planned them. Okay, so in this lesson, we've looked at how to write an article, yep, you've got to write about what you're interested in, but you see, once we have this, even though it's not planned, we can transform it, but that takes, you know, a bit of skill, it takes a decent handle on vocabulary, it takes a bit of creativity, you know, but remember, it's not about just giving information, it's about making the reader imagine how bad or how good something was. So, as I said, I do coach people with their writing skills, so if you do need any help in producing a professional article, then honeyourenglish.com would be a good place to go. Hope this video has been useful to you. If you're not a subscriber, please consider becoming one, and you'll get all of the new content coming onto this channel, and there's some really good stuff in the pipeline. And have a go now at the quiz on www.engvid.com, just to sort of summarize what you've learned in this lesson. Until next time, happy writing.