To improve your writing skills, try reading poems, avoid cliche’s and over-used words

#TeenEssay

After a year and a half away from school, students started the school year last month gathered on the field for back-to-school speeches. And after a few, it wasn’t hard not to notice the amount of academic jargon: the kind that inspires and empowers individuals to keep persevering and connects to an important framework of teamwork and leadership skills. Behind these new normals and paradigm shifts, there is a tangible message being conveyed, but it is obscured by confusing language, over used words and cliches.

In English, clichés are quite overused. Likewise, certain words are over depended upon in speeches or writing. I try to avoid clichés in my writing in order to be original, but this awareness has recently become a constant source of writer’s block for me.

For the most part, grammar and structure isn’t the issue. But the repetition that comes with writing and reading academic essays makes it easy to become trapped in a pattern of habit. I found myself dreading writing when I noticed repetitive, formulated sentences passed over from my other assignments with a voice in my mind telling me “There’s a better way to put this.”

Like many people, writing became a chore for me. The monotonous and everyday speech and the unoriginality of standard English that I see everywhere in news articles, television, and at school, faded my interest in trying to improve my writing.

However, at my point in high school where writing essays is important, I’d like to try some new ways to improve my writing.

George Orwell described writing English as an art, rather than a science. Rather than using “ready-made phrases,” simple and concrete language with vivid metaphors will always be more effective. One thing I will try to do to improve my writing is to read poems. The creative ways that poems conjure images and express an idea will hopefully improve my art.

Shion Britten is a senior at Southridge High School and enjoys playing the trumpet, baseball & hiking.