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I believe the writing correction or WRITE section of The Linguist is very very important. This is where you have the chance to use the words and phrases you have learned. You are under much less pressure than when you speak. You can take a little more time to try to express yourself accurately in English.

 

Your writing submission is a sample of your language. It is an indication of how you are doing. It is very valuable, both to you and to your tutor. So just write and submit. You should not review your writing too much before submitting it. Your writing sample need not be perfect. It should just be an indication of how you are using English. Just write down your thoughts and submit your writing. The chances are that the errors identified are also occurring in your spoken English.

 

When you get back your corrected writing, please treat it as a valuable piece of information. Read the corrected text out loud at least five times. Review the errors and recommended new phrases. Try to see the pattern of your mistakes. Look for phrases in your new reading and listening that can help you improve in your areas of weakness.

 

If you are a Basic member you can write 300 words a month. If you are a Premium member you can write 1000 words a month. This is not a lot. Our Linguist correctors try to correct every mistake. We want the corrected version to be the same as native speaker English. We want you to spend a lot of time studying the corrected text so that you can learn and improve.

 

From now on our correctors will not normally correct spelling mistakes. You should use the spellchecker to make sure that your spelling is correct. We will no longer treat contractions as a mistake. Although contractions are not usually acceptable in formal writing, they are common in normal communication and correspondence. Similarly, even though it is considered good practice not to use numerals for numbers up to and including ten, we will not treat it as a mistake if you do.

 

You invest a lot of time in writing, and our corrector spends a lot of time correcting writing. Finding mistakes is a good thing. It tells you what to work on. It is like finding a new content item in our Library with new words to learn. Remember that in language learning the goal is not perfection, it is constant improvement.