Clear writing as a problem of Russian learners of English

Abstract

The article reports the outcome of the research conducted in several groups of Russian learners of English and aimed at improving the rhetoric of their writing. It highlights some issues of flawed style with the focus on unclear expression. Treating unclearness as a typical drawback of students' compositions, the author singles out the main kinds of unclear sentences and makes an attempt to find their causes. As follows from the observation unclear writing shows itself in three major manifestations: excessive writing, implicit writing and ambiguous writing. All these types of unclear sentences are caused by several reasons, which include: mother tongue interference; interference of style, genre or register; conventional nature of classroom communication; factors reducing students' capacity to work. The obtained data and the students' feedback enable the author to speak about certain improvement in the students' writing at the end of each round of the research. This fact is also confirmed by comparative study of students' papers at the end of each year: the participants in the research showed better performance than the students who were out of the experiments. The article is completed with the author's views on how to improve the English writing of Russian students © IDOSI Publications, 2013.