Introduction

The increase in the use of digital communications like email, text messaging blogging and social media posting has made the writing skills in recent years much more important than ever. The students need to be able to compose not only formal writing assignments but also informal messages, and they need to be aware of the differences.

There are a number of different approaches to teaching writing skills, and it is the teacher’s responsibility to choose between them, or to use a combination of them, deciding whether students need to focus more on the process of writing than its product, whether they need to learn and practice writing in different genres and whether they should be encouraged to learn creative writing. All of these will be used to build the writing habit.