Do you want to improve your writing skills? Do you believe that you should write more in English on your own? Do you think that you should have more writing practice on your own? If so, please read this article. I am going to explain how writing on one's own can worsen your writing. Yes, writing on one's own can reinforce your mistakes. You can damage your English by writing in English!
If you make few mistakes in writing, then you can write on your own and it cannot damage your English. It can only help. But if you make many mistakes in writing, then the more you write the more you reinforce your mistakes. As you write, you repeat your mistakes constantly and it becomes your strong habit to make those mistakes.
Do you now see my point? You write - you make mistakes - those mistakes become your habit, they become your way of writing in English. The more you write the worse your English becomes. This is a paradox. You need practice to learn English. And when you practice, you reinforce your mistakes!
In my personal process of learning English, I have found a solution to this problem! It is close to the truth that I never wrote an incorrect English sentence. No matter what my current level of English expertise was, I was always using ONLY that which I knew to be correct for sure.
I knew many grammatical structures and I used only those that I knew well. My sentences were copies of the sentences which I knew to be correct. I followed good examples and in this way all my sentences were good. In the beginning I could write only very simple sentences, but all the simple sentences were correct. Then as I advanced, I added more and more complicated structures, and again all my sentences were correct.
Thanks to this approach, I was never reinforcing bad habits. I never had bad habits! From the beginning, I copied only correct sentences. With every sentence that I wrote, I reinforced my good habits!