I doubt that you are lazy, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.

Come on. Even if your parents forced you to be here, or if you are a parent and you really don’t want to be here, there is a part of you that understands very clearly that there is something lacking about what you are doing and you want to improve it.

However, that does not mean that you are good at practice.

In fact, chances are you are here after having done past year paper after past year paper or written exam script after exam script, only to realize that your scores are not improving.

To that I say, well…

Not all practice is created equal.

Practicing to get better at first language English is not a matter of just doing essays over and over again.

It is also about spending that time isolating the specific things that would help you get better and then actually training those things.

Let’s now talk about how to practice intelligently.

All of these were just suggestions on how you can get better at practicing, but do not think of them as dogma. Each of you readers has a different mind and a different approach to things, and at the end of the day, whatever practice method you choose has to work for you specifically. However, I think that some things here remain absolutely true:

In order for you to get a sense of how to improve, you first have to know where you stand, and you do need to know where you want to go.

Beyond that, a lot of things are negotiable, and how and whether you improve are up to you – What’s for sure, though, is that intentionally choosing to look for better methods and seeking out intelligent ways of improving in a way that suits you will far outperform just blindly going into the preparation process hoping and praying that writing a few essays is going to magically make you into one of the greatest writers on the planet.

With that in mind, do you have a strategy or do you have a plan in mind for improving your writing this year and leading up to the exams? Let me know down in the comments!