When I was a child I learned how to write proper Spanish by following what I will refer in this article as the karate-kid or Mr.-Miyagi approach. I present here two approaches to learn and improve your basic writing skills.
1. Take a class on grammatical and orthographic rules.
2. Read lots of grammatically and orthographically correct text, not bothering about rules.
By using the first approach you can get a sense of how to construct correct sentences early on, but the effects depend a lot on having rules hard-coded in your brain very heavily, practicing with those rules with lots of examples can certainly reinforce the rules to be learned.
The second approach does not involve learning rules at all but just reading lots of text data, let's say books. After reading lots of correctly structured sentences and words you can develop a sense of how a correctly structured sentence or word feels like without being conscious about rules. In other words for some cases you will be using rules almost without consciously thinking about them due to the amazing ability of our brains to find patterns. This second approach is the data-driven approach or as I prefer to call it, the karate-kid approach because I suspect this is the path Mr. Miyagi would have chosen if he had to mentor a pupil about how to write properly.
 |
| Mr. Miyagi asking his pupil to wax cars over and over again. |
