Learning a new language depends on three parts: listening, writing and speaking. Of these three, speaking is by far the most important. Speaking allows you to take part in conversations, and it improves your writing skills. Here’s how:
Accessing subconscious knowledge
When you are writing, you have all the time in world to construct a sentence, recall the correct grammar, look up words in a dictionary and even use something like Google Translate. Speaking does not offer you the luxury of time. You have to think on your feet, and that is when your subconscious mind takes over to help you produce speech.
Your subconscious mind has recorded many English conversations from watching television, reading English articles and books, and hearing conversations between native or non-native English speakers. The knowledge is brought forward into your conscious mind in the process of speaking. This helps you in many different ways including being able to speak a sentence without struggling, even if the sentence isn’t perfect.
Creating new neural pathways
As your subconscious mind takes over and gives your mouth the knowledge it needs, to make the sounds you want it to make, it creates many different neural pathways. Imagine your brain as a big road map. The word you are looking for is somewhere in the right-hand corner, while the meaning is hidden somewhere in the middle of the map. As your subconscious recalls this deep knowledge, your mind creates a direct pathway between the meaning of the word, and the word itself.
The next time you write something and you want to use the same word, the meaning and the word are much more accessible to you on a conscious level.
Hearing what sounds right
Because of the vast knowledge your brain already has about English, your subconscious mind can let you know when something doesn’t sound right. You might be mispronouncing a word that you’ve heard before, and it just doesn’t sound right. Your brain searches through its neural pathways and discovers what the word sounded like the last time you heard it. You repeat the word correctly, and your subconscious relaxes. As you speak, you become used to recalling these sounds, and even maybe the spelling of the word.
A couple of days later you attempt to write down the word. The brand new neural pathway is still fresh in your memory and in your mind’s eye you can even see the letters forming the word. Now you don’t need to look it up before you write it. You can just write it down!
Theory into practice
Now that you know speaking helps you to write better, put the theory into practice. The next time you need to write an email, or finish an English assignment, say the words out loud before you start writing it down. Try recording your message on your cell phone and listen to it. You will find that spelling and grammar flows naturally; the sentence structure is less awkward; you understand what you are trying to write and you know how to write it.