Instagram Post - Blog Posts

Here's a quick sketch i did on a notebook, hope you like it! 🐉🐲

Ps. Go check my Instagram account : sparse_note_2 for other sketches and art!

Story #19, that is about another amazing workshop I hosted for the Writing Incubator Project.

As we are about to embark on a fall season, I’d like to share a few words about the session I was honored to host in May 2022. 

The workshop I prepared was about “Stealing lexis from real articles to use in your CPE articles” (and any other articles as well). 

So how do you write a CPE article? Bet you’ve heard dozens (hundreds, thousands even?) of times that you should read real articles, explore the language, highlight some nice examples, and make lists of collocations or idioms you could use in your own piece. You do it mostly intuitively, just relying on your inner self to cue you, which is the right thing to do.

But where do you begin? How do you know what’s a good and what’s a bad choice? That’s what we had a look at in our Writing incubator project in May. And here I will succinctly summarize it for you in a god-knows-how-many-words blink. 

The technique we used is called investigative reading. However, before you even start opening your favorite sources, be it NY Times, The Guardian, or the Washington Post, for authentic articles in order to mine any good lexis you could borrow, create your template. And what do I mean by that? Find or invent the prompt of the article you intend to write and go through it.  Then start reading articles on the topic. Highlight the language. See what you can borrow. Explore it. Put it in your article. Toss some away. Experiment.

Is it something you can do with real articles for your blog? Sure thing, just keep the plagiarism rule in mind. Three consecutive words is borrowing, and more is stealing. 

The trick is, the more you write, the more you notice, how words and phrases naturally and effortlessly find their way into your pieces. You’ll start having your own unique style with a bunch of favorite chunks and structures. NO secret here. You just read some more, write some more, rewrite some more. 

On a related note, it occurred to me that I've never posted the article I wrote for that workshop following the aforementioned guidelines. So here it is, story #37 on my blog.