143 How to Improve Your Writing Skills By the time you reach this page， you will have studied 142 lessons of this book. You will have learned many new words， idioms， sentence structures and quite a bit of grammar. You will have come to a stage where you might be asking yourself， "How much have I improved， if at all？" Why not give yourself a simple test？ Read a short text. Read it carefully， then try to rewrite what you have just read， in your own words. After that， compare what you have written to the text. This is called paraphrasing. In face， it is a good way to improve your writing skills.