What is writing?

Writing is one of the four language skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. Writing and speaking are productive skills. That means they involve producing language rather than receiving it, as in listening and reading. Very simply, we can say that writing involves communicating a message by making signs on a page. To write we need to have something to communicate, and usually someone to communicate it to. We also need to be able to form letters and words, to join these together to make sentences or a series of sentences that link together and to communicate our message in such a way as to get our message across. We will look at how we do this.

Key concepts

Make a list of what you have written in your language in the past week.

Maybe you haven't written anything in the past week! But perhaps you have written a shopping list, a postcard, a birthday card, some emails, your diary, some text messages, or maybe a story. If you are studying, perhaps you have written an essay. All of these are examples of written text types. You can see from this list that text types involve different kinds of writing, as each text type has different characteristics, e.g. single words only, short sentences or longer sentences; use or non-use of note form, addresses or paragraphs; different degrees of formality; different layouts; different ways of ordering information, i.e. structuring the text.