How to write well in English ✍️ (with Fabio Cerpelloni) [975]

You're listening to Luke's English podcast. For more information visit teacherloop.co.uk Hello listeners welcome back to Luke's English podcast. How are you doing today? I hope you're doing fine. So let me tell you what I have lined up for you in this episode. So this time I've decided to turn our attention to writing in English.

The plan is just to talk about the whole subject, a discussion on writing and writing skills, including considerations of what skills are involved in being a good writer,

what makes a good piece of writing, what are the challenges faced by learners of English who want to write well, what are some solutions to those challenges,

the experiences of using AI to help develop writing skills and even what it takes to write your own book in English. To do this today, I've enlisted the help of Fabio Churpalloni, who you might remember from his previous appearance

on this podcast. He was in episode number 850, which was called any language you want with Fabio Churpalloni. Let me just give you some background info about Fabio.

So Fabio Cervilloni is an Italian writer, writing teacher, ghost writer. That means he writes work for other people who then put their name on it. Blogger, author, English language tutor, YouTuber, and podcaster. In terms of Fabio's credentials, he's a fully qualified teacher of English.

He's got the cell tour. That's the certificate in English language teaching to adults. The Delta, that's the higher diploma in English language teaching to adults. He also has a master's degree in professional development for language education, and he's

got the Cambridge C2 certificate of proficiency in English. And as you will hear, all of those things involved doing a lot of writing. Fabio has been an English teacher for years, working at the British Council and also at other institutions.

He is a writer for the EL Gazette, and also for StoryLearning.com, which is one of the biggest language learning websites that you can find. He also writes some things for medium and he's got his own blog and sub-stack newsletter. So why is Fabio a good person to talk to about writing? Well he's got a special interest in writing. He's focused

on it in his master's degree. He helps learners of English with it in lessons and in writing workshops and he's written plenty of blog post articles about writing and also he's written two books, one about his personal journey learning English and how there is no single correct way to learn a language which is what we talked about in episode number 850.

And his other book is called Tiny Book Author. There's a tiny book in you waiting to be written, a tiny book to help you write your own. So Fabio knows a lot of things about writing. does writing himself and in fact he's written a book about writing a book. So let's talk to Fabio about writing. We're going to start in just a second. First I have two things to say,

two more things to say. The first thing is that you will find a transcript of this episode. If you want to check it, you will find it. There's a link for it in the description. You can just get it, check it, read it and whatever. The second thing is that at the end of this conversation, I will summarise the key points that we make throughout this interview.

So if you feel that you've missed something or if anything isn't clear, just keep listening because I will summarise it all at the end. And this will ensure that all the main insights about writing in this conversation are summarised, nice and simply and clearly for you at the end, which should make it all a bit easier to

understand and remember. So I do encourage you to listen all the way through to the end to have this packaged up for you nicely summarized for you nicely so that you've got all of those bits of wisdom and advice packaged neatly for you to take away. Okay, right. So without any further ado then, let's get started. Let's meet Fabio. Let's talk about writing. Here we go.

I've never been one of those kids who wrote stories when I was five. Like I never had this big passion for writing since I was a kid. But I basically started writing because I had to write for my teaching training courses. So I had to write academic papers, but academic assignments.

And I started liking it from the very first page. Like I like seeing meaning. I like seeing a sentence building and then creating meaning for another person that they can read.

And that was what I like about writing. But all the writing that I did until 2021 was all writing because I had to, like for English exams because I took several English exams like the first certificate, the IELTS, CPE, you know C2 proficiency, now it's called.

And it was all writing for an examiner or for a tutor. And then in 2021, I started my blog. I was one of those teachers who moved online, teaching online. And I saw that other teachers had a blog and I thought, okay, I must, I need to have a

blog as well. And I started blogging. I started blogging about language learning at the beginning. I still have that blog, but I don't really talk about language learning anymore.

And yeah, this is what attracted me to the written word. Did I answer your question? Absolutely, you did. So, what is different about writing compared to other ways in which we use English?

So if we're talking about productive skills, we talk about speaking and writing. I think a lot of the time our learners focus on speaking skills, unless they are preparing for an exam in which case they definitely need to work on writing different types of text, but a lot of the time people focus on speaking.

So what do you think is the difference between spoken English and written English? I would say that the main difference is that speaking is not permanent. You can speak and speak and speak, but your words, they kind of disappear in the air, whereas writing is more, it's permanent, it's there.

Maybe forever. And so this is kind of scary. It's what at the beginning, it scared me a little bit, because if you, if you, if you