Writing a coherent text can be daunting but don't underestimate its value as a strategy in learning new vocabulary and how a new language is put together.

How do you start?

You may start with an idea, a few words or a visual or auditory prompt. Something a teacher has given you or if you are motivated something you initiate yourself in a writing journal. A few words may lead to an association of other new words or an image may spark a list of vocabulary about the topic.

Often the vocabulary you first choose are nouns, adjectives and main verbs. These are words that communicate your thoughts and feelings, and impart main ideas and information about a topic.

So if you are writing a narrative or recount about a social event you may come up with words such as:

<em>friends...party...eat...drink...happy...</em>

At this stage, you are brainstorming. To get closer to being accurate with what you mean, a good dictionary and a thesaurus will help. When looking up a word don't just choose any word at random, think about or research the context in which the word is used.

So for example, the word <em>party</em> in a thesaurus lists <em>festival, celebration, banquet, dinner, barbecue, gala</em>. A <em>festival</em> is suitable to use for a narrative about a cultural event celebrated at a regular time each year. A <em>barbecue</em> is suitable to use for an informal social gathering but a <em>gala</em> is a big, public event usually with entertainment. Which one will you choose?

<em>friends...festival...party...celebration...eat...drink...</em>

Now what else is happening? New words may spark more words and your list grows.

<em>friends...Christmas...festival...party...celebration...eat...drink...happy...</em>

<em>champagne...alcohol...fruit mince pies</em>

However, these words don't function well just sitting there on their own like a lonely heart. The reader won't understand the deeper intent of what you mean. They need to beat within the body of a whole connected text.  

Yes that dirty word 'grammar' will raise its head.

Start thinking about the grammatical words you need. Often these are the small words that help connect it together.

Here are some examples of these small words:

Articles: <em>a  an  the</em>

Prepositions: <em>in  at  on  for  with  from  about </em> 

Pronouns: <em>I  you  he  she  it  we  they  me  my  mine  hers  that  this</em>

Conjunctions: <em>and  but  so</em>

Helping (auxiliary) verbs: <em>be  is  are  have  has  do  does  was  had  did </em> 

Modal verbs: <em>can  may  could  would  should</em>

You may forget them when you are writing. That's why having a list of the most common grammatical words comes in handy. For a longer list, just take a look at <a href="http://blog.writeathome.com/index.php/2013/03/the-100-most-used-words-in-english-2/" target="_blank">The 100 Most Used Words in English</a> and you'll see that most of them serve one of the above functions.

As a new English language learner, you may also notice that you often miss hearing them when you are listening to fast paced speakers. That's because they have a short stress sound and are linked together quickly in oral speech so are easy to miss. In writing, they serve the important function of structuring your meaning. Or to use an analogy, the skeleton connects and holds up the meaning.

So here we have the first few sentences.

<em>My friends and I happily celebrated the Christmas festival at a party. There was champagne and fruit mince pies. I don't drink alcohol so I didn't drink the champagne but I ate the delicious fruit mince pies.</em>

Without the skeleton, you could guess what it is about just from the main vocabulary but you won't have an accurate picture of what happened.

What if you wrote this?

<em>I and my friends the Christmas festival celebration party and we were happy and we eat mince pies and drink champagne.</em>

In this example, you can also guess what it is about but using the structures incorrectly or missing grammatical features makes the readability of the text very difficult. Overall it's not very well expressed without a correctly built skeleton. It shows that more learning needs to occur before you get how it is strung together.

If your first attempt looks something like this and your teacher points out the errors, don't despair. It's only a first draft so don't give up. In fact, it's a good start. You're just at the beginning of the writing process and teachers like to see this process. Drafting and re-drafting are the next stages. Keep working at it and the process will become easier each time.