writing too simple...any ways to improve?

I'm not sure what your friend meant by "simple." Was he (or she) referring to your vocabulary? Your sentence structure? Your content?

Reading a lot would certainly help. But if you want specific advice, you need to explain what "simple" means.

(BTW, Your message reveals that you have a problem with punctuation. However, I doubt that this is what your friend was referring to.)

that's how bad my english is. Anyway, I think its vocab...

If vocabulary is the problem, then reading a lot will help a great deal. You also might want to try word games and puzzles.

There are also books designed to help people improve their vocabulary. You could probably find them with a google search. Sorry I don't know of any off the top of my head.

Welcome to A2K!

What I think that your friend is confusing simplicity with clarity. One can write properly using a more sophisticated vocabulary, as long as the person expresses himself clearly.

When I was in college, I took a course in writing in the A.P.A. style. That is the format that the American Psychological Association utilizes. The first part of the article always has an abstract. That abstract, which is no more than a paragraph long, summarizes what might be a research paper or experiment that is many pages long.

What it taught me was to write as sparely as possible. I was forced to choose each word carefully, and include the most important concepts. A person, reading my abstract, would know exactly what went happened in the research or experiment. It was probably one of the most valuable courses that I took in school.You might want to try doing that with a magazine or newspaper article.

My other advice to you is to keep on writing, whether on A2K, a journal, or simply letters or E Mails to a friend. The more you write, the easier writing becomes. Be careful of your spelling and punctuation. If you write something in a journal, loook at it afterwards, and see if you could have expressed yourself in a better way. Good luck!

Ernest Hemingway used to write in a fairly simple, straightforward style. Love or hate him (people seem to feel one way or the other about his work), you can't deny his talent.

Vocabulary can be improved by reading. Everything you can get your hands on that's in English. Newspapers, books, magazines, cereal boxes. Anything. One thing you might start to observe is the differences in style. A lot of this has to do with the intended audience. We speak to children somewhat differently from how we speak to adults, and the same is true of our writing.

Teach yourself new words. Go to www.dictionary.com and www.thesaurus.com and look up words you don't understand at the first and then put them into the second site and you'll learn some synonyms for that word. And look up those words, too. There are very few truly pure synonyms in English. Rather, the words are close but have differences in shades of meaning. Here's an example.

Let's say the initial word is cow. You know, the big farm animal. Well, English has these related words:
bull
calf
heifer
cattle
beef
ungulate
ruminant
Guernsey

They're related but not the same. Try looking up any of the unfamiliar words and you should be able to see what I'm talking about.

Each month, the Reader's Digest has a feature, "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power". It might be worth your while to take a look at that.

Simplicity is the soul of elegance . . .

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes.

Classic poetry and elegant English expression--and it contains exactly four words of two syllables, and all the rest are single syllable words. I would urge you to increase your vocabulary, and at the same time to keep your expression as simple as possible. If you mean to say that a cow looks like this:



and it's important to what you are writing to specify the breed of the cow in question, then write guernsey--otherwise, cow will do just fine.

so...simple is ok? As long as the thoughts are clear?

Well, it helps to conform to the rules of grammar, word choice and spelling, but, yeah, simple is best if you don't want to mess with your readers head and take the chance that your thought will be lost in the forest.

Simple is almost always best.

A paragraph full of flowery, overly long and complicated language can be torture to read. I've often found myself unconsciously just changing the words in my head. For example -

The domesticated canine is in a somnambulent state.

can be completely replaced with

The dog is asleep.

I'm inclined to let sleeping dogs lie.

There is no reason to assume that a sleeping dog is any less truthful than a wakeful dog.

Sleeping dogs dream of dinner. Waking dogs (some with distended guts) are frequently prone to a fabrication about meals they have not received.

How about an example?

that example about the dog is really good lol...

Yes it is...but I meant how about an example of your work...just a paragraph or so.

Language is around us. It's a life form we count on for communicate and express our ideas to the world. Whether it's Chinese, English, or French, it helps us understand many events happening around our environment, such as building new ideas, and creating solutions for many problems. Language has become our life-sentenced partner; it has been around us, it never abandoned us even when we hated its existence, and still aid us in many aspect of life since the first mankind stood up on Earth. In The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas suggests that language is a living organism that has a symbiotic relationship between humans and their environment, and this relationship is undoing human chauvinism.

Your problem isn't that you're use of language is too simple. The problem is that you don't seem to fully understand the words you're using and how they should be applied. Let's look at one sentence.


Whether it's Chinese, English, or French, it helps us understand many events happening around our environment, such as building new ideas, and creating solutions for many problems.

Do events happen around our environment? No. You can say, "It helps us understand what happens in our environment."

"Building new ideas." Ideas are not built. They are created, formed, developed. You refer to building an idea as an event. It is not an event.

You need to learn the meanings and applications of words and how the words work together. You need to stop and think about what your are saying. I think your writing would be better if you had tried to make it more simple, not less simple.

Expand your vocabulary, but be sure to learn words in a context. One way to do this is by reading more and paying attention to the language as well as the meaning.

wow....what u say is true. I always pause for a bit to check my writing.