 Letter writing and letter writing practice could sometimes seem like a difficult and daunting task. But what I want to show you is that when it comes to preparing for letters and practicing letter writing, so this is non-fiction writing, it's actually not a very difficult and daunting task as long as you remember these eight steps when it comes to letter writing. And of course, you need to make sure you include all of these eight components within your letter. Now, let's say, so I'm gonna come up with an example. Let's say you are given a statement to do with climate change. Is it important? Is it not? And you decide that you're going to make the case within your letter that climate change is a really important issue and you believe it's something that perhaps, let's say this letter is going to your local MP. That, so you believe that not only is climate change important, but your local MP should prioritize it. So as you can see behind me, what I've done is I've crafted and created a fairly basic mind map to show you the eight simple steps you can take and you have to consider when writing a letter, okay? And I'm gonna use the idea of climate change as an example. So let's begin with the first step when writing your letter, okay? You always must begin by adding your recipient address. Recipient address simply means the person that's receiving your letter. Usually you want to put the recipient address in the top right-hand corner of your sheet of paper that you're writing your letter in. And how you write it is, you begin firstly with the name and the surname. Of course, remember that this is usually a formal letter that you're writing, therefore, make sure you also include the titles that they go by. So let's say you're writing to your local MP. You might not know who your local MP is, so you can just make the name up on the spot. So let's say your local MP is called Sally Smith. She would be called MP Sally Smith, because that's her title. Even you can write the right honourable MP Sally Smith, okay? If she's a doctor, it would be Dr. Sally Smith. However, if say Sally Smith is your headmaster or rather headmistress, it would be Mrs. Sally Smith, okay? Just make sure you add their title as well, okay? So, oh, if she's just a regular person and maybe a regular and married woman, it's miss or if it's a man, mister, okay? So let's go back to the address. You start off with your recipient address, which is MP Sally Smith. Then you add the first line of their address, which is, for example, one Westminster way. The second line is the city. So it's London, perhaps they live in London. Third line of your address is the postcode, which is letter, letter, number, space, number, letter, letter. The letters are all capitalised. So let's say they live in SW1, one HK, okay? That's the recipient address. MP Sally Smith, one Westminster way, London, SW1, one HK, right? That's the recipient address. That's step number one, done. Then once you have written your recipient address, always make sure, so you've put it in the right-hand corner, going back to the left-hand corner of your page, you then add the date. I will suggest don't make the date unrealistic. Don't say that it's 21st of May, 3033. I will suggest just literally putting it the date that you've written in, okay? So for example, 1st of December, 2022, for instance, okay? So you start off with your recipient address step one, then the date step two, 1st of December, 2022. Then make sure your third step is where you address the person you are writing to, okay? So you're addressing who you're writing to. In this case, it's Der MP Sally Smith. You're writing to the MP. Of course, if you're writing to your headmaster, it would be, for instance, Der Mr. John Smith, or whoever, okay? So third step is address the person you are writing to directly. Obviously making sure that you write the name and this surname and keep it nice and formal. That's step number three. Step number four is now you introduce this issue you are writing about. This is your first four paragraph. You are introducing, why are you writing to them? So let's go back to the original discussion that I've mentioned, which is you're writing about climate change and you want to make the case that climate change is really important. So that's the argument that you're making, okay? So in your introduction, a good way to start an introduction is to create a little bit of friction rather than starting your introduction in your letter by saying, I am writing this letter to talk about climate change and why climate change is important. That's really boring. You still need to bring your reader in a little bit, okay? For instance, if you write into your local MP, remember that local MPs and MPs in general tend to get lots of letters or get hundreds of letters every day. So how are you going to make your letter stand out? You make it stand out by making it interesting, intriguing. You make the introduction quite compelling. A good way to start is there are many people who would say blah, blah, blah, however I disagree. So for instance, with a climate change example you could begin by stating, there are many people who don't think climate change is an important issue. Other issues happening around the world are far more important. Yet I disagree. I think climate change is a central issue. That is your introduction where you have made it really clear and you can even go into lots of detail. You know, we're seeing lots of earthquakes, natural disasters, hurricanes and unseasonal weather happening, illustrating that, you know, our habits are causing climate change, right? You can go into lots of detail but in your introduction you've made it really clear in an interesting way what you're going to be discussing and also which side of the argument you stand on. That's step number four. Now step number five is now where you include your main substantial reasons. This is your body paragraphs, why your issue and why you believe from your perspective that for example climate change is really important, right? So in step number five, this is where you outline your main points. Try to aim to write three main points or at minimum two main points arguing for your perspective, okay? And when you argue for your perspective, illustrate to your teacher and your examiner that you understand, you don't only talk about it only from your perspective, you also need to back up your discussion with anecdotes, examples and statistics, okay? So you want to show that actually, this is what I think but beyond me, there's been studies out there and these studies have shown this statistics or beyond me, there's this anecdote of somebody else who also has experienced the same thing that I am really passionate and worried about or beyond me, here's some examples, right? So going back to this, perhaps you can say your first main point as to why climate change is important is because we're seeing unseasonal weather and ultimately, you know, our planet Earth might actually get destroyed much sooner than we anticipate, right? And here you can make up a statistic you can say for example, according to Oxford University, 70% of land mass will disappear in a hundred years if we carry on, you know, having our effect on climate change as we currently are, right? So that's a made up statistic. However, you're using this statistic, using like, you know, a prestigious institution like Oxford University to say, you know, according to them, land mass is gonna disappear and this is why climate change is important. You're making it more convincing. Another reason, let's say in this case, you can use anecdotes as you can say, actually within your consistency, there's a person called John Doe who lives, you know, up the road and his flat recently was submerged in water because there were unseasonal floods. This is a really great example of how climate change has even affected people within your constituency. Constituency means the place where the MP looks after, right? So you've given a really specific example of one human being, an anecdote who has been affected. This humanizes your example, okay? While statistics show generally in the broad population, you know, what is happening using statistics and numbers, anecdotes really focus in on one individual and really humanize them, okay? You can also add, for example, some extra examples. So talking about different forms of climate change, like, you know, what are they causing? They might be causing hurricanes. They might be causing polar ice caps to melt really quickly in places like Iceland and Greenland. Other examples could be, you know, flash floods, flash fires in places like Australia, whatever, right? Those are just general examples, again, to strengthen your main points. So that's step number five. Of course, it's not the fifth paragraph. It's your writing, after your first introduction, you want to write at least two to three paragraphs, summarizing and summing up your main points within your letter. Of course, make sure when you're writing, still try to ensure that you're making your letter really interesting, entertaining for your reader, using things like similes, using rhetorical questions. All of these elements that still make reading quite intriguing for your reader, okay? You don't want to send your teacher to sleep. You don't want to send your examiner to sleep and get them really bored of your letter. Once you've included your main points within your letter, step number six is now you need to include counter arguments, okay? So now you follow in after your three main points or your two main points, why people disagree with you, okay? You need to add at least one or two counter arguments showing that you can balance your discussion. Counter argument simply means why might some people disagree with you? Why would some people say, actually climate change is not important? Counter arguments when debating are really important because it shows that you have an ability to also consider other perspectives and other points of view. So for example, using counter anecdotes, counter statistics, and counter examples, you could say, you know, some people would disagree with me that climate change is important. They would say that actually this focus on climate change is a distraction. There's other more important things such as wars that are happening right now. For instance, a war in Ukraine, you know, gender inequality globally, right? So there's still lots of countries within the world today that do not give equal access to education to women as they do to men, right? So some people who would argue against climate change, why it's important would present other issues as being even more important, right? That's a counter argument. Maybe for example, another counter argument to the idea of climate change, which I might put forward for instance, is, you know, other people would say that actually, you know, the floods that we're seeing, the hurricanes and stuff like that could just simply be just the earth kind of writing itself, right? We've got all these tectonic plates beneath our earth's crust, which means that, you know, we sometimes when we see flash floods, sometimes when we see, you know, issues that are happening around the world, this is just the earth's way of just correcting itself. And floods didn't only happen once human civilization came around. Things like floods, natural disasters and things like that actually happened well before we had warehouses, well before we were polluting the planet. So actually climate change is not necessarily a massive issue because that's part of how the world works, right? And with those two counter arguments, of course, you can make up anecdotes, you can make up statistics to support those counter arguments, okay? Now, when you've added counter arguments and you've shown that you've considered why people will disagree with you, what they say is what they would say, your seventh step is now to close your paragraph and your discussion to say, okay, I have considered these counter arguments. I've presented to you my arguments. I've considered why people will disagree with me. However, that being said, this is a good way to start your closing paragraph. That being said, I still believe climate change is really important because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You just reinforce your perspective before in the eighth step, you then sign off kind regards. So for example, if I was writing the letter, I would just end with kind regards, my first name Barbara, my surname, Jiao. And that's really it. You can also end with your sincerely, your faithfully, I like kind regards because it's much easier to spell. So that's really it when it comes to letter writing in eight simple steps. Thank you so much for listening.