If you’d like to improve your English by writing more (as you should!), this article gives twenty three methods of motivating yourself to do so and to make that practice useful by setting yourself targets for what, how and how much you should write.
Write something in English every day
That something you write could start with just being your to do list, and go all the way up to a story or imaginary letter to someone famous when you have got used to writing in English and have more time.
Ten minutes writing in English every day
Once you’ve got into the habit of at least writing example sentences on your vocabulary list or your schedule in your diary in English every day, it’s good to set a minimum amount of time in which to do several such things or to do some work on something longer such as a blog post.
Daily English diary entries for a month
Every evening or the next morning, try to write at least a couple of sentences on what happened in the day, how you felt about it, etc. When it gets to the end of the month, you’ll know whether writing an English journal is something that is motivating enough to be worth continuing, or whether you should try writing something else.
Two English writing tests per week
Exam practice can be motivating even for people who don’t need to take the exam, and two IELTS essays, a Cambridge B2 First essay and review, etc is a good minimum level to get enough practice to improve without tiring yourself out.
Someone who you will only write to in English
Everyone knows someone else who is also keen on improving their English and so who might be willing to interact in that language as practice. Only chatting to your local friends in English might be going too far, but many people are happy for their written social media interactions, emails, etc to be in English.
Something published in English in the next 12 months
That something of yours that someone else publishes could be a short article in a local English-language listings magazine, a review on a shopping or travel website, a blog guest post, a letter to the editor, etc.
A better writing test score within six months
It can be difficult to know how much your English is improving, so it’s worth getting someone to grade your writing graded to see if that grade is going up. If you don’t want to pay for the actual test, some websites offer estimated IELTS Writing scores if you paste your essay into the comments section.
Emails in ten minutes
If you use the right tactics for writing quickly such as copying typical closing lines, there is no reason why most (formal or informal) emails should need to take more than fifteen minutes, so ten minutes is a good thing to aim for.
Have a comment published every week
This is particularly motivating if the comments go up on a moderated site, as this will mean that someone has read your comment and found it valuable enough (or at least sufficiently on topic) to be put up on the site.
Get a response from a company
This is particularly motivating if your email, comment on their online feedback form, tweet, etc actually gets you something like a partial refund because of what you are complaining about, but even just a reply can be motivating enough.
Get more replies than previous posts
It can also be motivating to aim to get at least one more like, one more share, one more view, etc. However, if you get comments in English, those replies mean that people have understood what you have written, you can get reading practice as well from checking their comments, and you can write more as you reply to them.
An accepted contribution to crowdsourcing
This could be a contribution to a Wikipedia page about someone from your country that has little information in English, or just a comment on the editing page that people agree is a good idea.
Half of your social media posts in English
This could be English posts on the same topics as you post in other languages, or half of your posts being things that are designed more for an international audience such as news stories from your country that didn’t get much coverage elsewhere.
Fifteen new words or expressions in a single story
If you don’t worry about how crazy the plot gets, it should be possible to combine at least ten of the vocabulary items that you have put on your list of things to learn in a single piece of writing, either in prose or in something that is more like a movie script.
A (better) English CV/ resumé in two weeks
A fortnight should be enough to read advice on English CVs, find out the English names for your qualifications and educational institutions in English, etc.
12 genres in 12 months
For example, in one year you could aim to write good examples of a CV, a formal letter, a friendly email, a report, a story, a restaurant review, a diary entry, a dialogue like a movie script, a poem, song lyrics, a blog post, and an application essay.
Make fewer mistakes
By turning off the grammar check and/ or spell check until you have finished writing and then counting how many corrections it makes when you turn it back on, you can work on reducing that number each time.
Stop making one mistake in your writing
It can be very difficult to work on every possible error in your writing at the same time. One good alternative is to pick one thing such as “missing articles” or “missing third person -s” and to try to avoid that error for one month or so, before you switch to doing the same for another language point.
Tick more things off a checklist
If you can find a list of descriptions of a good IELTS essay, a good application letter/ cover letter, a good email reply to a customer complaint, etc, you could use it after each time that you write, and make sure that you have ticked off more points than last time.
Do it again, but better
It can be good to do exactly the same writing task one month later, then compare it to your first attempt, checking that you did so better the second time around.
Use more impressive language
Although it is more difficult to judge than not making mistakes, for your language development it is more important to try to use more of the kinds of longer words, collocations, idioms, etc that higher-level language learners use and lower-level learners don’t usually know.
Write more quickly
Once you can write an email in fifteen minutes, an IELTS Task 1 letter in 20 minutes, etc, try setting a lower limit (perhaps one minute lower each time).
Write something longer
Once you are regularly writing 50 words a day in your diary, 100 words a day of the story that you are working on, etc, try putting the word limit up by ten words per week, by five words every two days, etc.