Academics

7 Ways to Quickly Improve Your Essay Writing Skills in University

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Writing essays is an obligatory part of being a student. Every assignment you complete will demonstrate the improvement of your skills in it. Nonetheless, you can make it even more effective if you follow the seven simple tips shown below.

Read

To be good at any kind of writing, you have to be a reader first. Whatever type of writing you want to learn, reading books will enrich your vocabulary with no special effort. In fact, every book you read is an opportunity to understand what good writing is about. You will develop your taste as a reader and learn to deconstruct what there is about a book that makes you like it.

For example, as an experienced reader, you will understand what kind of stylistic devices the author uses to make it work. As soon as you are able to pinpoint those, you can try using something similar in your own writing. Even though academic writing does not always allow going full Flowers for Algernon in your style, your lexical and stylistic decisions in your essay will be more mindful and reasoned. Thus, it will be easier for you to express your thoughts in an intelligible and coherent way.

Start with the thesis statement

You mustn't start your essay with a thesis statement. Rather, you should start your work with it. A strong thesis statement is a lion's share of a good academic essay. Apart from making you earn a high grade, it simplifies your work as a writer. However, you need to take your time and construct a good one. A thesis should answer the two main questions about your work:

  1. What idea do you want to deliver in your essay?

  2. Why is your idea valid?

If you construct a compelling thesis statement, as a bonus, you will have the structure of everything after that before your eyes. You will know that all the following paragraphs must be related to the statement, and it will be easier to structure your thoughts. Ultimately, the only thing you will have to do in the concluding paragraph is restate your thesis statement and repeat why you are right about it.

Talk to your classmates

As it goes, a problem shared is a problem halved, and you should remember that when you face a tough topic you have to write an essay on. If you want to understand a topic, study it along with your classmates. The fun thing about that is it is not necessary for any of you to understand it profoundly. Throughout the process, you will help each other with it. Also, communicating with your peers will broaden your perception of the issue and allow you to write an interesting and thoughtful essay, whichever standpoint on the problem you support.

Learning with peers, although it is not obligatory, is a big part of your development as a student. Not only do you prepare for the finals together, but you also make this process fun and, if you are lucky, find new friends along the way.

Love your professor's comments

Another dreadful episode in a student's life is opening the submitted draft and finding it covered in corrections and comments from a professor. Everything seems wrong and it appears easier to burn it and write a new one rather than revise it. However, a crucial part of your improvement in writing is fixing what you have already done. If you disregard the comments from your professor, you will make the same mistakes again. Working with an essay you have already written, you can focus on the technical and structural aspects.

The good news is your teacher is only interested in improving your writing-not destroying your confidence. For that reason, do not be afraid to read feedback. Sometimes, it takes longer to accept it than to fix it, so just do not be afraid. You can look through your work and never do the same mistakes again, which is basically your growth.

Use online tools

There is the whole internet to help you write a perfect essay. In most cases, you still have to complete it by yourself. However, you can find plenty of services that will make it better. For example, you can check out the following services:

  • Automated citation builders. On such a website, you can generate citations for the sources you used in a particular academic style. It is important to note that sometimes you still have to make manual corrections in the generated citations, such as capitalization issues. However, you will be sure that the order of data and syntax in it are correct.

  • Spelling checkers. Check your documents for mistypes, and sometimes word choice. Such services will make your writing sound smart and will make sure you spelled everything correctly. Also, some services can even evaluate the readability of your work, which will also be an improvement.

  • Plagiarism detection. If you quoted some sources from the internet, you should make sure you worded and cited them correctly. Just in case, you can check the text of your essay for similarity. However, free detection services will not show the result of other students' submitted works.

  • Essay writing services. If you need an essay by tomorrow and your skills still need to grow, you can get professional help from a custom essay writing service with a team of ENL writers. The assignment will be completed according to your instructions and you will also have it as an example of how to do it correctly.

Practice

It works just as it does with reading: the more you do, the faster you grow. Practicing writing helps you organize your thoughts and clarify what you want to articulate. For that purpose, you get assignments, such as writing a research proposal or a detailed outline for your essay. When it is not intuitive, you have to think out every structural element of your essay and present it as an elaborate writing unit that fulfills its function.

Know your sources

The sources you use for your papers show your literacy as a student and researcher. If you decide to use blog posts, encyclopedias, or even magazines, it will undermine the credibility of your essay because your ideas are based on unreliable sources of information. When you research topics, try to find scholarly articles or official data related to your issue. For example, an article you can trust has an author and publication date. The author or authors of such articles present quantitative proof of their ideas and introduce them in a logical way. Ideally, such article was issued in an academic journal no longer than five years ago. You will soon learn what sources are trustworthy and what are not. However, if you cannot present all the citation data, something may be wrong with it.

Most of these tips do not require extra time or effort, but if you pay more attention to each of them, your writing skills will significantly improve. So, make every step of writing your persuasive essay topics.

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