In today’s world, content is king. But what good is a great idea if how you struggle to express it well in English? What’s more, in today’s fast-paced world of digital marketing it can be difficult to find the time to improve your skills. That’s where this brief guide to improving your English writing comes in!
In this guide, you’ll go beyond simply switching out passive for active voice and learn how to write engaging, easy to follow marketing content in English. With these simple tweaks, you’ll improve your English writing whatever the topic or text may be!
A marketer’s guide for improving writing skills in English
The guide is broken down into four key points. For each point, be sure to check out the additional resources linked to learn how to write even better texts in English.
1. Use descriptive language thoughtfully
Pay attention to your word choice and in particular your use of adjectives. Adjectives such as nice, interesting, good, bad and fine lack a real descriptive element that allow your readers to feel something when reading your texts.
Try and avoid nouns like thing(s) and stuff. In fact, these are the kinds of words an English teacher at school will typically ask a student to change!
Dig deeper and think of what you are actually describing. In addition to that, make sure you are consuming plenty of content in English and noticing any new descriptive language you come across.
In this Oxford guide, you can learn more about how to build a strong vocabulary.
2. Be careful with false friends
A false friend is a word that exists in two languages, but carries a different meaning. A good example is the difference between the word ‘currently’ and ‘actually’.
If you are talking about something going on at the moment, use ‘currently’, and not ‘actually’. ‘Actually’ is used to mean either 1) really or in fact or 2) to express a feeling of surprise or unexpectedness.
Here is a guide to typical false friends between English and German, as an example!
3. Pay attention to collocations
Another useful tip for improving how natural your texts in English sound is to pay close attention to collocations. A collocation is a group of words that typically come together. There is usually no explanation why they go together; they just do!
For instance, we can say: Today heavy rain is forecast. ‘Heavy’ and ‘rain’ typically come together. Thick or large rain would sound unusual here. Even though these adjectives have similar meanings to heavy. If we were describing ‘fog’, we could describe this as ‘thick fog’ as opposed to ‘heavy’.
A good way to double-check collocations is by using a collocations dictionary, such as Ozdic or Linguatools to check which words typically go together.
4. Make use of linking words
Remember those little words like ‘moreover’, ‘therefore’ and ‘despite’? These words are called linking words and are extremely useful, as the name suggests, for linking your ideas together. The kind of linking word you use depends on whether you’re adding ideas, comparing one idea with another or expressing some kind of attitude towards a situation.
What’s crucial to remember is that some linking words are much more formal than others. ‘Therefore’ is pretty formal, whereas ‘That’s why…’ is much more everyday English. So check the required formality of the text you’re writing when selecting your linking words. You can learn much more about linking words in this excellent Grammarly post about the topic.
So there you have it! A marketer’s guide to improving your English writing skills. In this guide, we looked at word choice, false friends, collocations and, of course, how to link your ideas together. As you’ve seen, with some small changes, you can easily improve the impact of your writing and write even better texts in English.
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Lewis Blakey 
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