Another fun way to improve your English skills is by reading short stories. Good short stories paint a picture in your head. Reading stories is a great way to improve your vocabulary.
Short stories also use language naturally, so they're great for improving your English fluency. Unfortunately, some short stories can be too long for beginners. Fortunately, there is flash fiction.
Flash fiction is a very short story. Some have 100 words or fewer. How great is that?
The most popular example of flash fiction is this six-word story, which many say was written by American writer Ernest Hemingway. We don't really know who wrote it, but the story is still one of the best examples of flash fiction:
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
What do you think is the story there? Who is selling the baby shoes? Why is he or she selling the shoes? What happened to the baby?
Here are more examples of flash fiction from Wired Magazine. Wired asked science-fiction, horror, and fantasy writers and other celebrities to write their own flash fiction.
"Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket."
- William Shatner
"Heaven falls. Details at eleven."
- Robert Jordan
"The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly."
- Orson Scott Card
You can read the rest of Wired’s compilation of flash fiction here. All the stories are six words long.
If you want longer stories, The Huffington Post has a great compilation here. Lastly, here’s an excellent compilation by The New Yorker.
If you enjoy reading flash fiction, challenge yourself further by writing your own. That’s another great way to improve your English skills!
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