I remembered a while ago, someone once asked me, “Tell me something you’re good at, anything will do”
I ponder upon the question and respond,
“Anything? Elaborating sentences.”
Now although it sounds pretty simple, elaborating sentences has always been part of my life since my freshman years back in 2011, it is a skill that I learnt in my previous university majoring in English, and I have brought it with me when I study business and marketing in China. It gave me the skills to execute copywriting for various companies because most of the time I was given very little words, and I need to elaborate them for overseas marketing purposes.
Discovery and exercise elaboration of sentence
In my university years, we always have projects and reports that require us to reach at least a certain number of words. One of the reports we had made a significant impact to me because it was so challenging; it caused a spurt of growth to my writing skills. I remembered very well that during that time I was 800 words short from the 3000 words target. The paper was rather academic, so it is not a space for Creative Writing. I had to turn my personal story into a case analysis and support it with theories from various academic papers. I started with one theory, and elaborate it 3 similar theories, then I need to break down some parts of the case and use certain keywords to correlate them. Creating analysis of “what if this” and “what if that happen”.
A free demonstration and exercise
Anyone can practice this since it is beneficial to steemit writing, especially when one ran out of ideas and inspiration.
For instance, let’s pick a random topic, My chat groups.
Topic: My Chat Groups
Key points to talk about your chat group, are they interesting? Boring? Do you chat with everyone everyday? Are you the chatterbot or more like an observer? Are you the one who responds “Ok”, “Okay” or “K”
Example:
Paragraph 1
I use Wechat. My chat groups are rather boring. I don’t chat with everyone. Sometimes I’m a chatterbot, most times I prefer to read. I always respond “ok”.
Now it is time to elaborate then 5 sentence structure to longer sentences.
Paragraph 1: edited
I use Wechat a lot, mostly it is because Whatsapp and other messeging apps are banned in China. My chat groups are rather boring, there isn’t a lot of conversation around until someone decides to throw money packets around for a special occasion. I prefer to be an observer because I treat the chat groups like a news column, I will only voice out if I need to ask something. Among “Ok”, “Okay” or “K”, it depends on who I’m talking to, most of the time I will respond “Ok”. I personally think that people who respond “K” are too lazy, so if someone texted me “K” , I usually text back “L,M,N,O,P…”
So that is all for the simple demonstration, as you can see I elaborated a short paragraph into a longer one . So anyone can try! Now elaborating sentences is just one of the skills I have. I usually write about life in Beijing so I hope that you enjoyed this somewhat educational post.
---That's all from me, see you next time---
Reena.K