Get them to "edit forwards and proof backwards". Reading from the last line, aloud, to see their mistakes. Also, stress the importance of writing short sentences which they can control, before attempting to write longer sentences.

I have loads of suggestions, tried and tested, in my book (now being translated into Arabic): http://www.amazon.com/Study-Skills-International-Postgraduates-Palgrave/dp/140399580X

Get them to "edit forwards and proof backwards". Reading from the last line, aloud, to see their mistakes. Also, stress the importance of writing short sentences which they can control, before attempting to write longer sentences.

I have loads of suggestions, tried and tested, in my book (now being translated into Arabic): http://www.amazon.com/Study-Skills-International-Postgraduates-Palgrave/dp/140399580X

Dear Martin Davies. Thanks for your suggestion.

For three decades, I´ve taught how to write in Spanish, and many of my students tell me that they can apply these simple rules to writing in English and in any language. A good writing style consists of action verbs and nouns while minimizing use of adjectives and adverbs. Eliminate forms of the verb "to be": they weaken style and retard pace. Also, vary sentence structure. Finally, in an essay, set forth main ideas at the start, then proceed to prove them with examples in the body of the essay.

Dear Nelson, great ideas. Thank you for sharing. However this remark about adjectives and adverbs is surprising.

Dear Nelson Orringer. Your remarks made me happy. I mean using action verbs and nouns to develop students' writing skill. I have recently started an empirical study entitled The impact of Explicit Teaching of Nominalization in EFL learners’ writing skill." and i hope it goes extremely well based on you precious experience. What is your idea about my in-progrss research?

Dear Beata,

Poets know that adjectives and adverbs ending in -ly retard the reading pace. In pastoral literature, adjectives abound because poets seek to portray a timeless world. In epic literature, action verbs predominate to keep the pace moving. Nouns have more force than adjectives. "To move with haste" strikes harder than "to move hastily."

Bahram, give me more details about your study. I agree that nominalization, use of nouns, improves writing skill. Also, eliminate forms of "to be." That omission forms the greatest secret of good writing. In my recent book on Lorca, the editor forced me to cut pages. I reduced use of "to be" to a minimum, substituted nouns for adjectives and adverbs, and peppered my paragraphs with transitive verbs.

A simple technique I use is to ask students to describe how was their weekend (or any pher pertinent event) by using verbs at the beginning of the sentence - eliminating the noun "I", and, as Nelson Orringer suggests, ommit the use of verb to be. The results are surprising. Also, at the end of a lesson, students have to write what they learned by combining verbs and direct objects. For example: "Learnt to ommit the verb to be in order to develop my writing skills". Certainly, the essential support for vocabualry - which is another big hurdle for learning English - is to use a thesaurus.

Dear Rafael,

In Spanish one enjoys the flexibility of putting the verb at the beginning of the sentence. In English, French, and German, that flexibility does not exist: a pronoun ("I," "Je" or "Ich") must always come first. English and French tend toward terse syntax. Spanish and German prefer more complex constructions. These idiosyncrasies of individual languages help determine how to hone students' writing skill in different ways. I have published some books in English and others in Spanish, so I instinctively feel the difference in each language. This instinct we must try to convey to students,

Dear Nelson, as I have discussed in my three papers entitled “Ideational grammatical metaphor in scientific texts: a Hallidayan perspective”, “Nominalizations in scientific and political genres: A systemic functional linguistics perspective” and Critical discourse analysis of Barack Obama's 2012 speeches: Views from systemic functional linguistics and rhetoric”, Ideational Grammatical Metaphor (IGM) based on Halliday (1985, 1994) is twofold, i.e. Nominalization and process types. Halliday (1994) argues that using nominalization is a must in academic writing.

To put it in a nutshell, IGM is a substitution of one grammatical class, or one grammatical structure, by another: for example, his reflection on instead of he reflected on. Simply put, the process of reflecting has been turned into a noun.

Halliday and Webster (2009) have argued about the necessities of nominalization in scientific writing and believe that the urge for it is the fact that the core of scientific texts was the development of a chain of reasoning (ultimately based on experiments) in which each step led on to the next.

Nominalization reduces the number of clauses to make more information be compressed and packed into each nominal group which enables an academic and scientific writer to concisely and precisely refer to recurring abstract ideas, a single sentence to encapsulate in several complex abstract ideas.

Nominalizations construct and contribute to abstraction, generalization, impersonality, objectification, information load, language economy and cohesion, ambiguity and, of course, beauty of the texts.

Dear Nelson,

In my empirical research, I am explicitly teaching students to write and utilize nouns than adjectives and verbs by indicating some samples of nominalization. To bear in mind that the excessive employment of nominalizations in a text will result in complexity and intricacy and the readers will be unable to grasp the main ideas. This is efficient for EFL and ESL learners to write native like sentences.

I'd be glad to get your ideas and suggestions over the topic.

Dear Nelson Orringer, I just teach English, nor French, Spanish or German. I am not trying to impose a rule, but to make my students aware on verbs focusing. I certainly agree with your observations. Once my students are aware of the verbs as a sentence axis, I observe the grammar rules. A final remark is that when you read scientific abstracts, in most indexed journals, you can easily see that the noun is not used!

Dear Prof. Ibarra,

So you teach English by breaking the usual grammatical rule before re-imposing it? I should think that this inconsistency might lead to confusion on the part of students. Perhaps I err, though. Scientific abstracts do not always conform to conventional grammar in formal writing. In the humanities, however, abstracts tend to use conventional grammar. I know because I generally research in the humanities and write abstracts that follow the usual grammatical rules.

Dear Bahram,

As I understand nominalization, therefore, it forms a shorthand for less compact verbal clauses. Now I have to confess to you that my system of writing with nouns and active verbs increases expressive dynamism and serves an esthetic function more than a practical one as your systems do.

Dear Nelson Orringer, I wish language is only composed by rules. You surely know the long debate between the anomalist and analoguists: use and norms. Unfortuantely, norms not always win, do they? When students want to learn another language - in this case English- the most common process is ignorance, confusion, comparison with native language, confusion, learning, practice and self evaluation. And yes, you err. After every essay students write, they are evaluated following the criteria: Answer to the question? Comprehensibility; Organization; Fluency; Grammar and Vocabulary. Besides, in the middle of the semester and at the end of the course students are evaluated according to "norm" exams. I agree, the scientific abstracts do not always conform to conventional grammar in formal writing. However, if editors of journals establish the structure they want, what can you suggest? Not to pay attention to editors convenitional requirements and follow the rules? The cost is usually high in terms of time. Their papers are rejected in a period of 2 months or so.

For any type of writing (but especially academic writing) in any language, writing out a clear thesis/main argument and then making an outline is helpful. Writers also must be willing to revise and cut, cut, cut. If you have a clear thesis then I read each section and paragraph to determine, "what is the main point in this section and does it support the main argument of the whole paper?" Then I do that with each sentence, "does this sentence add to or clarify the main point in this section?" Any idea, paragraph, or sentence that does not pass this test needs to either be re-written or cut.

I would argue that, so far, the discussion of this topic is too narrow, dealing primarily with structural issues that are only one part of effectively teaching writing to EFL students.  Missing is the importance of modeling, which is best achieved by encouraging students to read English texts so that they can analyze the connection between structure and rhetorical aim.  Reading serves another vital function--it builds students' vocabularies and usage awareness.  Another missing component in this discussion is the teacher-student conference, in which teachers provide individual guidance and instruction related to rhetorical purpose and local/global features of effective writing.  Many people are surprised to learn that when this pedagogy is implemented effectively, EFL students can produce writing that is superior to that of native English-speaking students.

Absolutely agree with James. What helped me most (being a non-native speaker of English) was total immersion in reading and analysing how other people write. So, modelling is essential. With lower level language skills max guidance is needed and with advanced users minimal, I believe. That's how we make new language our own, not just as the users of the acquired skills and knowledge, but as the creators too.

Dear Rafael Ybarra,

Of course you need to follow the editor's rules, even if they break with grammar. That goes without saying.  Going beyond the abstract and right into the body of the text, you know that English writing differs from Spanish writing.  I publish in both languages, and find that a terse style predominates in English-- no matter the model-- whereas a more abundant rhetoric prevails in Spanish, whatever the model.  Also, Spanish writing style is more distant from Spanish speaking style than English writing style from English speaking style.   

Invite them to divide the writing process into two phases -- the creative and the analytic or editorial.  In the first phase, they write whatever comes to mind, using an outline they either create as they go or in advance.  Then, they go back and polish up the writing.  I've written about using this process in a series of books I have written, including MIND POWER, THE EMPOWERED MIND, and THE INNOVATIVE EDGE.

I agree with James and Snezana. Often "bad writing" by EFL students is a question of understanding the conventions and moves which are made in English texts. Do not underestimate the power of good models to teach this. Models can be very useful, especially if they discuss topics the audience is passionate about in an eloquent way. The important thing to remember about models is that students do not always know what to look for, so you need to show them what these arguments do well in their use of language, the structure of their argument, etc. Model, analysis, imitation is the sequence I like to use with my students. 

Have the students search for all occurrences of prepositional phrases beginning with "of the", "by the", "for the", etc, and turn the word at the end the phrase into a verb, adjective, or adverb. Cleans up writing very quickly.

There are four aspects:

1. Language competence and relevance of the task. I mean, students develop their writing skill if they have enough accurate English to express what they want and the task allows them to do so.

2. Four skills, not only one. It is important to develop four skills in balance, as a priority given to one makes the other three deficient. In order to write well a person should read more and effectively,  verbally express their ideas fluently and be a good listener to accumulate all the necessary language one hears.

3. Practice makes perfect. Get your students practise this skill as often as possible. Simply said, to write better one needs to write on a regular basis.

4. Two (or more) heads  are better than one. Use 'peer-review' as often as possible; very helpful is 'group-writing' or 'pair-writing'. A very lively and involving activity is 'wall-writing' which actually is a variation of group-writing. There are many more and you can easily find them, just google.

In a nutshell, to improve our students writing we should help them develop their English through reading, listening later materialised in speaking and writing; create the classroom environment where they can work together and practise writing; encourage them to write regularly through challenging home assignments.

Some great ideas above, to which I would add that reading texts of a similar style will help to develop the target language and skills necessary to write something original.  Reading gives the tools of writing.

"Writing in the Sciences" offered by Stanford Online is worth checking out. The course is currently ongoing and structured to include peer-editing, but auditing is welcome as well. The first half of the course is on effective writing in general and the second half is on writing a scientific manuscript. 

https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Medicine/SciWrite/Fall2013/about

The most important technique that I use is one I learned from a great teacher and mentor, Larry Weinstein. I had the great good fortune to be randomly assigned to his section of Expository Writing in the first semester of my freshman year at Harvard in fall of 1977. The first class meeting was also the last. Larry announced to the students in the section that, as there were seventeen students in the room, so there were seventeen separate sets of writing issues and problems that each of us had to deal with; that there was no way any class could be designed in a lecture/group discussion format so as to deliver to each of us what we needed most; and that henceforth class would be structured as individual conferences with the teacher, in which we would write a paper each week, bring it to the instructor at our weekly meeting, which would begin with his reading the entire paper out loud. After that, we would go over it line by line if necessary. But the magic bullet was HEARING YOUR PAPER READ ALOUD BY AN EXPERT WRITER AND READER, who would read it, voice it, exactly as written and punctuated.

Many habitual mistakes in my writing that had been allowed to survive by a series of good teachers in grammar school and high school were gone by the end of the semester. The most imoprtant lesson I learned that semester, which I now regularly use in my teaching, is that THE EAR CATCHES MISTAKES THAT THE EYE WILL MISS. I don't have time to read all students' papers aloud to them. But I sit down with them in private, circle problem sentences, point them out to the student and ask: "What's wrong with this sentence?" When they say, "It seems OK to me," I tell them: "Read it out loud to me." Or sometimes, I just read it to them.  And almost every time, halfway through the sentence, they will stop and say, "Oh, I get it."

This is especially useful for two areas of writing instruction: punctuation, and complex sentences where students attempt to balance subordinate clauses without understanding how to do this. I use this is a teaching moment to reflect on the relationship between writing and speaking, text and voice. If we see the phonetic alphabet, and the rules of punctuation and grammar, as methods to preserve a particular form of expression and ALSO as instructions on how to voice marks on the page, then the difference between period, comma, colon, and semicolon suddenly don't seem trivial and my insistence on using them properly no longer seems like nitpicking. 

You can see the light bulb go on over the students' head as they assimilate this.

Thirty-seven years later, I still  think of Larry every semester and thank him. I hope you will find this as useful as I have.

A quick and pretty much liked task is copy  the students favorite authors (tales or short articles). It is for sure that students prefered certain texts because of the clarity  and received message. So, teachers can show the used structure of the author by analysing grammatically a text that is liked by students. At all time students are quite attentive to know every part of the speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, article, pronoun, conjuction, interjection). I enjoy doing this task and so the students. You never get bored. As excitement rises, students are ready to take writing challenges: to write an anthitesis of their favourite text or write an original one. It works quite well!

Dear Rafael Ibarra

Thank you very much for your contribution. I will definitely give it a try.

Have a look at REF-N-WRITE scientific paper writing tool. This tool allows you to import text from previous papers relevant to the subject area in MS word. While you are writing your paper, you can just search for similar statements from other authors and inherit their vocabulary and language to improve your paper. It also comes with a library of academic phrases that you can readily use to polish your paper. Here is the link for the site.

http://www.ref-n-write.com

They have some nice tutorials here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf7qyyKtbyQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6hlXzqO3r4