How WRITING Helps You SPEAK ENGLISH Better — Podcast

foreign this is Ethan from real life English where our mission is to guide you beyond the classroom to live your English in real life to help you speak confident natural English connect to the world and to actually use your English as the doorway to living your greatest life I am joined here as always in the glow Studio by my podcasting partner in crime Chiago oh man did you say crime am I in trouble now hey Ethan hey everybody yeah a partner in crime typically is you know when you think about bank robbers or people who commit crimes there might be two people who always help each other out in this but we like to use it figuratively to talk about two people who often do things often it's like collocated in a way that has to do with getting into trouble right but can just be used playfully as a way to say someone who you often are Partners in doing something so my podcasting partner in crime Chicago of course cool and what are we talking about today Thiago today we are talking about the importance of writing uh writing is one of those skills that Learners might not pay as much attention to as speaking for example but writing can be very useful even for your communication skills so we're going to be discussing about that today you know one of the things I love about writing Ethan is that writing helps you organize your thinking because we have many ideas many thoughts and sometimes you know in order to craft those ideas writing can actually be beneficial in that case like what do you think about things what do you think about the world uh so by the simple habit of putting your thoughts and ideas down on paper or on a Google doc first it's great because it declutters your mind already because we have so many thoughts in our head throughout the day so this habit of writing things down it declutters your mind and second you can look at that mass that's true you know wrote on the piece of paper and then you can say okay how can I organize this now how can I make it coherent and then you can start crafting ideas maybe creating paragraphs and then before you know it you have a piece of text that communicates a feeling that you have an idea that you have or an opinion that you have um I have been teaching English for 15 years and I have done a lot of writing in my professional career as an English teacher and English professional I have done in our essays for proficiency exams I have done freelance writing writing blog articles for other websites I have done personal uh blog articles I used to have this personal blog and I used to also write there so I would say that this habit of writing has helped me communicate better now I'm able to better organize an idea an argument and present it with Clarity I was surfing online the other day and I saw this quote that I really enjoyed it said that writing is the deepest form of thought and I have to agree with that what would you say about the power of writing Ethan uh I totally agree with what you're saying I think as a learner of a language it can be really helpful because it gives you time that you don't have when you're communicating and speaking so it really changes your relationship with the language because even if you're say you're writing an email which is something that many of us many people who are listening I'm sure it's something that you might have to do at some point with your English is write it in email in English to someone and you know if you were sending this as a message to someone like in in your voice if you were speaking to that person or calling that person you would have to formulate those ideas very quickly most likely you're going to make mistakes most likely you're not going to have that perfect word that that's in your head but it's not coming to you right away and so on and this even happens of course if it's your native language but writing can really help us with that and if you're writing an email for example the benefit that you have that you don't have on that phone call is that you know you take your time you find that perfect word you look up in the source even for an alternative to that that maybe sounds a little bit more formal or a little bit more informal depending on the case or you check in with chat GPT asking you know how it could help you to to polish that up or make it sound you know a little bit fancier or a little bit more light-hearted how you could insert a joke into there if it's the right case and so writing really gives you so much power that you don't have when you're speaking to to take your time to process and you can even learn during that writing process you do use a nice word there you see that light-hearted what's that you light-hearted yeah maybe you've had a really long week let's say so to to give people an example you might want to watch a lighthearted uh movie on the weekend you're not going to want to watch Chago of course always has The Godfather behind them you probably don't want to watch The Godfather Trilogy you're looking for something that you don't have to think too much about like maybe just one of those trashy movies on Netflix that that's always on the the main screen right so that's that's light-hearted and uh one of the things you were saying is that you have a lot of experience writing and you were giving different examples I talked about emails as well some people are just using their English for text messages right so I think when it comes to writing something really important to Define as with everything with your English uh something we always talk about in the real life way our method for learning English is to start with why so when it comes to writing you know why do you want to improve your writing why did you click on this podcast or this video you know to get some tips or to get some strategies to help you to improve your communication uh in writing and I think it's really beneficial to talk to reflect on that a bit because if you do that then it's going to help you to come up with the right strategy because maybe you need to improve your writing for an IELTS test or for the C2 Cambridge exam for example your strategy is going to be very different than someone who just wants to be able to better communicate with maybe they're married to someone who is a native English speaker and they want to better be able to communicate in text messages with their their family and friends so I think that those would be two very different cases of how to improve your writing right uh do you have any personal experience or stories to share Ethan about maybe how writing helped you communicate better most definitely because today we're actually talking about like improving your also your spoken communication through writing right almost as a as a tool for that so something when I first started out learning Catalan for example uh I started texting a lot with with different friends that I was making here in Barcelona and this was so useful because when you go into text on on an iPhone or on Android they both have like these different features where you're writing something and maybe you misspell a word or even it gives you suggestions for next words so this helped me a lot because you know I put the the language and cuts on and it would suggest words or it would give me the correct spelling or something or it would let me know at least if if I'm inventing a word that doesn't exist and so on uh and this was really great for for picking up all these different tidbits all these little pieces of information and from there you know as I started evolving my language and everything I kind of I got to a place where I had become stagnant where I had plateaued in my learning and so I was like okay you know what can I do and I decided to actually sign up for the C1 exam and this was really interesting because uh you know I had never needed to use katzon for work for example so I didn't have any motivation to improve my writing but for that exam as for any exam there's always a written portion of it and the written portion especially if you're at the higher levels which uh I'm sure Chiago you can talk more about this because you have a lot of experience in training people for these exams you have to be able to do a variety of different types of writing so one type might be an email another type might be a more formal letter um another type might be like actually talking about yourself or talking about a certain Topic in more of an essay format so like these are very different types of writing and this forced me to really get better and what was really key there was having a teacher who I met with every single week and you know she would give me assignments and then she would grade them and then when we came back or grade them correct them and then when we came to class together she could go over it with me explain to me things and it was really useful for learning so I think having a teacher by you is something that if you're really serious about improving your writing is essential but of course nowadays I mentioned earlier chat GPT these tools didn't exist for me when I was studying for that exam so that's another if you can't afford a teacher that's a really valuable tool they should start using if you're not already yeah just a word about proficiency exams like the Cambridge exam or IELTS um yeah it can be very useful especially if you are an intermediate or open intermediate learner and you want to take your English to the next level because usually the way the writing task is graded in those exams it's quite complete it's complete actually because it's a set of let's say criteria for example they analyze the content of your piece of writing meaning that did you understand the question they asked you and did you include everything that was asked this is one point they also analyze coherence and cohesion how coherent your text is your paragraphing the order you present the information your linking words you know how you link the sentences as well that knowledge they also analyze your grammatical accuracy when writing and finally the vocabulary range I mean if you can use various words synonyms antonyms so yeah I mean a four an upper intermediate learner who really wants to get past that plateau that can be very beneficial studying for one of these exams and I could deal with Catalan the C1 yeah and for some people it's an obligation right because they want to study abroad or work abroad and what you said about the rubric that's really useful too because you can look you can go look that up you know that's something that they they offer to you so you can see what kind of things are they looking for how did they uh you know how did they Define what good writing is because if you're just going open like I want to improve my writing but it's you know what does that mean so this can be something that gives you a lot more structure to to go Point by point and be like okay your grammar's weak or this is weak and that's another place I too would recommend having a teacher because they can read your text and they can say okay like you're really strong like you have a really um wide range of vocabulary that you're using but I can tell that you're weak on some of these different grammatical structures for example and they could help you to to work on those and another benefit of writing I would say is it develops for critical thinking you become better uh at thinking about things critically I actually pulled up here a definition that I really liked about critical thinking what is critical thinking so I got this from the website criticalthinking.org and uh let me just briefly read how they Define critical thinking this is really cool critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing applying analyzing synthesizing and or evaluating information gathered from or generated by observation experience reflection reasoning or communication as a guide to believe and action what do you think about this definition I really liked it when I saw it like oh I gotta say that in the podcast I gotta share that it's very very complete right there's there's a lot that goes into that it does yeah because you know I do have a personal pet peeve Ethan it's something that annoys you something that gets under your skin that annoys you irritates you so um I am a person who likes to understand the why of things and who likes to have reasons why I do the things I do why I like the things I like why I don't like the things I don't like you know from more complex abstract ideas to even simple everyday trivial things so for example you know that I like rock music I can give you a list of reasons why I like rock music it's not just because oh it's cool you know I like to go a little bit deeper and I try to encourage my son to do that as well my pet peeve is uh sometimes I ask someone hey you like that movie oh yeah I loved it great why what do you like about it and the person goes um I don't know it's nice or I don't know it's cool you know it's a very shallow superficial answer yeah that is a pet peeve that I have so um I think writing about your ideas your interests gives you that maybe deeper layer of thinking as well when I used to have my personal blog I used to write about everything just to share my thoughts and I remember writing a blog post explaining why I love rock music so much like you know I really thought about it just you know going deeper and why what is it about this style this genre that attracts me so much you know so you can apply that too like I said everyday trivial things but also more complex topics as well um what would you say about this idea of critical thinking Ethan and how writing helps you with that yeah I thought that was that was really interesting maybe you could even share an example explain more about your your son why you're why you're imploring him to learn more about critical thinking and to apply this more himself and and some examples of that because I know any parents listening probably would find that interesting but uh but yeah I think it what you were saying there is really interesting because I in some sense it makes you more complete as a human being it makes me more three-dimensional so if you get in conversation with someone and especially if we're talking about language if you're going out there to try to practice your English and someone asks you I don't know you just saw the new Avatar movie and they ask you oh what did you think about it and you say oh it was good it was you know great great uh visual effects and stuff like this that's just very very shallow but if you've practiced writing and you've gotten better at expressing yourself as we're discussing then you'll be able to practice your English a lot more when you actually get the the chance to speak because you can you can go much more in depth and this is going to give other people a deeper place from which they can connect to you bye I love what you're saying about being in a more complete human being we're well-rounded yeah because you become a more interesting person to talk to as well because you always have something to add to contribute in a conversational discussion so yeah this is a great point when I mentioned my son uh I I like to get him to ask why even for simple things like he likes to play video games there is a specific video game he likes to play okay I ask him why do you like this game and then he goes oh I don't know and then I tell him think think a little bit that's reflect I mean what is it about this game that you like is it the graphics is it the action is it the characters you know so encouraging him to think a little bit deeper and if you do that through writing that's going to help you even more develop this critical thinking because you can take your time find the right words and everything and that'll also translate to your speech exactly so speaking of pet peeves we're going to be watching a TED Talk that uh journalists share some of his pet peeves also about writing but before we get into that we have a shout out to a very special listener and app user [Music] all right the first shout out goes to shamodi and the shout out goes this app blows me away all the time we can not only listen to podcasts but also talk to other people and enjoy the process I can give 5 000 stars for this perfect app oh yeah it was amazing they said the app blows them away all the time what does that mean if something blows you away if something blows you away it impresses you it's so impressive that you you go wow you got like I don't know maybe flabbergasted or shout like in a positive wash truck wow that's amazing I'm Blown Away yeah so if you really want to take your English to the next level we don't have so many features yet for writing of course but you can be listening to this podcast there and get all the most important vocabulary with our digital transcripts and you know that's going to really help you to learn the most that you can from this and improve your writing and your speaking and the best thing for your speaking is maybe you're practicing your writing you're uh journaling about the newest film that you saw or about a video game that you're playing or something like that and you want to actually go out and practice speaking about this with someone then you know the only place where you can do that anywhere anytime at the press button is the real life app so check it out all right Chiago what do you have for us tell us more about this Ted Talk it's called how to write less but say more and the speaker is a journalist I think his name is Jim vandehe I believe he's a journalist who leads two media companies and in this talk he talks about how he and his team came up with this concept of smart brevity and basically this is about delivering smart content that is useful that is informative as humanly fast as possible because the point he makes here is that yes even though nowadays people's attention spans are a little bit shorter people still want good quality information smart content as he calls it but the the trick here is give me good content as fast as humanly possible and he said that when his team started to apply there's like this strategy called smart brevity they started to have a lot of business you know their business started to succeed and uh in this clip that I selected he's talking about one thing to avoid when writing he gives other tips but this is one of the tips and I found it really interesting let's say it's one of his pet peeves as well and it's quite funny actually so we have the clip here for uh to watch and uh T is gonna play for us now write like a human I don't I see this in journalism all the time I don't understand what happened to our species that when you put a pen in her hand or a keyboard in front of us we suddenly stiffen up think we're a Harvard Professor or we're Walt Whitman and we try to show off in our writing like if I was talking to you in the bar I'm not going to use s-a-t words I don't talk in acronyms I'm not going to use wordy Clauses I'm going to talk like I'm talking to you now I'm going to talk like a human so stop stop using those big terms you think that people think you're smart when you use them they don't they just want to throw a shoe at you [Laughter] really cool right that's fantastic you know I really loved what he said at the end of the clip here yeah you know you think you're being smart using all those fancy words no people just want to throw a shoe at me that was really cool I've met so many English Learners that do this as well because it's basically that that you think that you'll sound like you're maybe not smarter but you'll sound more fluent you'll sound more native like if you use really Advanced words but if you think about it I mean it's good to think about your own native language and how you speak with your friends um and even with your work colleagues you're probably not using that really fancy elegant language well in writing like oftentimes depending on the type of writing you're doing those can be appropriate um but it is good to keep in mind that some of that more flowery language might not suit you if you're having a casual conversation like you said at the bar maybe the person will want to throw a shoe at you so I don't think that's actually the case but it does make you it can make you sound unnatural right yeah for sure for sure so uh vocabulary here he uses stiffen up he says that when we get a pin in our hands we suddenly stiffen up what does that mean to stiffen up that might be a emotional response that it's like you you freeze you go stiff if something stiff it's it doesn't move it's not very flexible so when you're stiffen up you become stiff which happens oftentimes if we're afraid this happens to English Learners a lot they might say that they freeze up but you could also say that you've stiffen up when you get in a conversation and you lose the words that you know are in your head and I guess in this context of writing because you know he talks about being a professor and everything I guess he's referring also to losing your human quality when communicating right you sound robotic yeah you sound you get so stiff enough that you sound robotic but in the writing inner communication and he mentions um a person here called Walt Whitman I imagine he was a writer is that correct I believe he's a famous poet but I mean it's been a long time since my high school English classes so uh I don't know we might need to fact check that but if I'm not mistaken an American poet right right and he talks about showing off right uh because you know we stiffen up we try to be a Harvard Professor or Walt Whitman and we tried to show off in our writing when you show off you try to maybe brag about yourself or show how cool you are how smart you are but this is kind of a disapproving term you do that in a way that makes you come across as arrogant and nobody likes that nobody likes that kind of person you show off something I noticed was interesting there was he said if I was talking to you in the bar and it's interesting he used in here because usually if any Learners have studied this a lot that in on at that most Learners read then you usually think like at the bar right it's a it's a it's a Locale it's a small place so usually you think I'll meet you like Chicago after work I'm gonna meet you at the bar right so he says in the bar here because it's I believe at least he's thinking like inside the bar so we're inside the bar having a drink talking right so if you want to be literal about that like you are inside you can use in yes cool and he talks about SAT words I'm not gonna use s.a.t words if I'm talking to you in the bar what does that say t Ethan yeah so this is one of the standardized tests that we take in the United States that universities will look at it's one of the things that they look at uh for and uh for letting you enter into the uh into the institution right so generally when you apply for college you need to do the SAT or the ACT that's what I took it usually depends on the state one of the two is more popular and these are just standardized tests that cover like all the knowledge that you should have gotten from from your schooling uh they look at the score on those they look at usually they'll have to do like an essay or an application maybe even interview and things like this so um again something that you know would be really important to have a good writing if you're planning on applying to an American University what would you call the equivalent exam in Brazil yeah I think it's probably in Maine that's the name you know it measures high school students performance yeah so every senior usually in the senior year high school students they take it and they can use that score as credit to get into University for our Brazilian listeners and viewers to have a comparison there there you go yeah and well if he's saying that he's not going to use SAT words in the bar I imagine that he's talking about fancy words or really Advanced words right right so you know back when I was taking English in high school I had to read authors like Walt Whitman or you know any of these very To Kill a Mockingbird any of these really famous American literature right and so you in these English classes also are learning very Advanced vocabulary the same I'm sure as if you're taking uh Portuguese classes when you're in high school in Brazil or Spanish classes when you're in high school in Spain uh any of these places when you're at that age they make you memorize lists of very Advanced vocabulary right so on the sat there might be uh I didn't take the SAT but I imagine there's multiple choice exams where you know they might say this word you know what's the definition of this word and some very fancy word that you would never use with your friends at the bar but that they want you to know anyway and he also says that he's not gonna talk in acronyms and acronym is usually an abbreviation like you know s-a-t is an acronym that stands for something um do you know what it stands for S80 yeah let's have him do that I'm gonna guess it's standard something test yeah let's see if IC can pull it up but let's say MTV MTV is another acronym Music Television you know so that's what an acronym is it's a series of letters that mean a logger phrase ASAP ASAP as soon as possible that's great or ASAP that's not I hop do you know what the the IHOP is isn't that a place in the US like a bar or something it's a famous it's a famous breakfast restaurant the International House of Pancakes I'm not sure what makes it International yeah I think uh T just shared here Scholastic aptitude test there's some good vocabulary there Scholastic has to do with school and aptitude has to do with your level of something right or your aptness for something so basically saying that you're apt to go studying in a university for example T also shared here that this is what it means but as the test evolved the acronyms meaning was dropped okay I guess people just call it sat I guess right and uh they don't even think about that meaning cool cool and he also says I'm not going to use wordy Clauses a clause is a kind of a mini scent a mini phrase you know it's a it's a part of a sentence yeah usually it has a subject and a verb if you have a subject and a verb being used together that's a clause some sentences have just one Clause other sentences have multiple Clauses all right just to give an example of a clause here although he sings well he hates karaoke we have two Clauses here because first we have sing he sings well you see I have a subject he and the verb sing although he sings well and then I have another Clause he hates you see he the subject and verb again that's what a clause is but what he's saying is I'm not gonna use wordy Clauses something wordy is something that has many words more words than necessary like too long yeah so he's saying that he's gonna use short simple sentences if he's talking to you at a bar yeah I think a good rule of thumb is like you should be able to say it in a breath right if you're having to you know anytime someone's rambling and they're having to take several breaths just to for you to be able to get the idea of what they're talking about then usually you're not being concise enough in your speaking that's true and we also had some nice connected speech in here that we took note of so one that pretty much all the time you're going to see with connect to speech is if you see in front of in front of something so he said in front of us you know for example you could say in front of me it's pretty much always going to be the same so of would reduce to a schwa and sometimes it keeps the Vivo but we can also drop the uh he did keep it here and it connects to uh us so it becomes of us and then the T in the front drops and there's the T in front drops so it becomes from us in front of us so in front of us in front of me in front of them you can practice drilling this over and over again because it's always going to be the same and let's see what else so he said talking to you I think he actually said this a couple times so it's something that we often have in these ing words right is that we will drop the G so talking for example becomes talking um and then we have the two very similar to the of it's a function word so it reduces to an uh so we would just and we have an American T that happens there with talking to you so the T in actually becomes a d so talking to you talking to you you talking to me it's a great movie right now taxi taxi driver right yeah you talking to me [Music] you're talking to me classic line uh we have a really great one here because uh he says several times also I'm going to but he didn't say a single time I'm going to I believe I'm going to talk like I'm talking to you now I'm gonna talk like a human so we have three options anytime we see I'm going to most Learners know I'm gonna almost every learner has already learned gonna right but of course as the language evolves we keep producing more more we all know that Americans are very lazy right and this comes to our speaking too so we instead of saying I'm gonna we'll say I'm on a and even now sometimes and you can hear this in different songs you can hear it in series and everything we'll reduce it all the way to just IMA like um I'm gonna grab a drink at the bar after Jago do you want to join me or I'm a grab a drink at the bar you want to join me yeah I really like that you know especially the Amina I'm gonna crab so let's move into today's Big Challenge all right the Big Challenge we have for you guys today is we talked all about writing right so write a short paragraph telling us why learning English is important to you if you are watching us on YouTube you can leave us a comment down here under the video or if you are listening to us someplace else send us an email at hello real lifeglobal.com with your paragraph oh yeah it's a great way to put your writing into practice right now so take the opportunity go ahead and do that put your money where your mouth is as we like to say and uh maybe we could share we had another recent episode where we gave you guys a big Challenge and this was all about the b word so I guess I'll uh not say it here because if you want to learn more about that word you can go listen to that episode episode 335 where we also had you know a breakdown of Jesse Pinkman who's super famous in Breaking Bad using this word but let's uh see what our audience said so we asked you guys where else have you seen the b word being used alright so I got two comments here the first one comes from naoto and naoto says hi Ethan and Chiago this lesson helped me a lot thanks I always feel it's not appropriate to bring up a topic about curse words in my English lessons so it's been my long-standing question and I know a bitching song Ain't That A B by Aerosmith yeah there is that song it's true Ain't That A B by Aerosmith nice talked about yeah the Elton John song but we forgot about Aerosmith yeah shame on us and we also have here a comment from I think it's avini and Avenue says hello guys I heard the word be being used in one of those funny videos on Instagram some lady in the video says hold on let me get my glasses on so I can see it what is there and she puts on her glasses and says oh it's a b I'm dying of laughter from this all right I'm curious what the woman was looking at because I right I don't know if I fully got that I'd have to see the video maybe or was it Evan Jay can can comment and give us some more details about that because I'm curious now yeah yeah maybe I'll share the link to the video we can take them for sure so thanks so much for joining us this week on the real life English podcast we hope that you are going to go out there maybe just use some of the new words you've learned today and try writing a paragraph with them and if you want to whack it in the comments we have the big Challenge and we look forward to reading those and sharing them on a future episode of the podcast so one two three oh yeah but there are also health benefits to being bilingual or multilingual and especially for your brain so apparently speaking to languages or more is beneficial for the health of your brain as well so today in this episode we're going to be sharing some of the findings about that and what science has to say about these benefits now starting with the benefits of having a bilingual or multilingual brain uh one thing that I

Channel: RealLife English

Views: 136,291

Keywords: reallife english, writing, real life, practice speaking, practice english, english podcast, learn english

Id: IjgaoHcEEMo

Length: 32min 31sec (1951 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2023