Free How to Become Smarter by Charles Spender Page B

comprehension will improve if you watch movies and TV with subtitles and listen to internet radio while doing chores.
Fluency and pronunciation will improve if you read out loud for 20 to 30 minutes every day. Internet chat and message boards are also useful.
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Prerequisites to good writing performance
     
    Writing is the most difficult type of work that I know of. Research suggests that most students perceive writing assignments as difficult. Some types of writing, those that are unrelated to one’s school or job, are easy, for example, e-mail and text messaging. Writing e-mails is easy and pleasant even when it is job-related. In this section we will talk about the writing tasks that your job or school requires. This is the kind of writing that you have to do, not the kind of writing that you want to do for fun.
    Writing tasks involve active creation of information or documents by typing or by writing with a pen/pencil. Some job- or school-related tasks may involve both reading and writing. For the sake of simplicity, those tasks where writing constitutes 25% or more of the total time spent belong to the category of writing tasks (this is an arbitrary cutoff). The following are some examples of writing tasks: writing of term papers, scientific articles or research grant proposals, writing of software, performance of certain types of calculations, and preparation of slides for a presentation. Writing a book is not related to a person’s job in most cases, but it is very difficult—you will have to take my word for it. A writer of a book expects to make a living off of the sales of the book; therefore, writing of books is a job-related task. Please keep in mind that most of the discussion below deals with such writing tasks as writing of scientific papers, term papers or writing of a book. I know nothing about writing of music and poetry, and these endeavors may require a different approach. Now that we defined what a writing task is, we can consider prerequisites to productive writing.
    Most of what I know about writing came from my personal experience rather than from hard scientific data on the subject of writing. I am not aware of any formal scientific discipline that studies productive writing. There are books and college courses that explain the rules of academic writing, but educational institutions do not teach students how to become a more productive writer, as far as I know. This is because no one has ever tested and validated this sort of techniques scientifically. In the absence of reliable evidence of effectiveness, no accredited institution is going to teach its students some sort of voodoo material. The techniques described below have helped me a lot, but rigorous scientific proof of their effectiveness is lacking. The kind of mental abilities and the mental state that are optimal for productive writing may surprise some readers. In particular, reading and writing tasks require different sets of mental abilities.
    Based on my experience, the list of mental abilities necessary for productive writing is the following: strong self-control and good attention control. That’s it. Writing does not require alertness, fluid intelligence, or good working memory, in the sense that these abilities can be average or below average and this will not interfere with productive writing. Writing does not require creativity either, at least during the phase when you are typing or writing up the text. As you will see later, creativity is useful during the planning phase, when you are looking for ideas and trying to come up with an outline of your future creation. Yet the most difficult phase is the typing and it does not require creativity. The mood state that is optimal for writing, in my experience, is slightly depressed mood and increased emotional tension. We will review each of these requirements in more detail below.
    Good self-control is the most important attribute of a productive