Often, college students are faced with one major challenge: writing the perfect essay. The difficulty of effectively turning your thoughts into words and delivering unique content which is free of grammatical errors is one that even the best students sometimes struggle with.
Seeing that essay writing plays a huge role in your academic success, it is necessary to improve your essay writing skills. One way to learn how to become a good essay writer is through constant essay practice. Before receiving a college assignment, you can practice writing essays at your own pace. When doing this, selecting a topic you are highly interested in will keep you motivated.
Apart from constant practice, there are lots of other ways to improve essay writing. This article will provide you with six ways to effectively enhance your writing skills and teach you how to improve an essay.
How to get better at writing essays
An essay comprises three major parts: an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Maintaining this writing format will guide you through the accurate organization of your essay. However, in the course of writing, you should be flexible enough to accurately integrate the specific guidelines given to you.
Below are some of the most simple strategies needed to help you get better at writing essays:
- Start with thorough research
The importance of research cannot be overemphasized, yet many students fail to completely grasp this importance. Combine your ideas with those of others by doing research. This helps you understand the topic and gives you a clearer perspective on the assignment.
When carrying out your research, avoid the urge to copy and paste another’s work, as this immediately counts as plagiarism. Doing this will make you lose authenticity, and you will most likely get a score below credit.
- Make an outline
When given an essay topic, you either have a flood of ideas for what to write or you have no idea what to write. A basic outline is a plan which helps with these things. It helps you organize your ideas, and generate ideas if you had none initially.
Begin by grouping each of your ideas and listing out how they would appear in your essay. Ensure that all ideas are interconnected. This means that a preceding paragraph should introduce the next paragraph.
- Understand fundamental grammar, punctuation, and style
Reviewing basic grammar rules involves understanding tenses and their proper application. For instance, you should know when to use “there” and “their,” “am” and “I am,” and so on. “Their” is a possessive pronoun. “There” is used as an adjective, a noun, or an adverb, depending on the grammatical context. “Am” is an auxiliary verb, whereas “I am” is a first-person singular pronoun.
Writing in the active voice rather than the passive voice helps with the tone of your essay. For instance, instead of saying “The ball was bounced by me,” you could say “I bounced the ball.”
Learning the correct use of your punctuation marks would help with the flow of your essay. Identify where a comma would be needed, a semicolon, a colon, and a full stop.
- Use the correct vocabulary
Familiarize yourself with the right terms required for a particular topic. For instance, if you are asked to write on the effect of the Terraform crash on the crypto market, you would need to learn the correct terms used by members of the crypto community. Such terms might include digital assets, coins, tokenization, dips, market valuation, financial regulations, and so on.
Try as much as you can to avoid using contractions and slang. Support your ideas with numerical facts and present statistical reports that back up your argument. Furthermore, do not use big words except when necessary.
- Use the counterargument technique
This technique simply involves mentioning an argument that opposes yours and then explaining why that argument is wrong. When doing this, ensure that you get your facts straight to efficiently present a strong counterargument. Support your counter-claim with statistical reports for authenticity
- Create time to review your work
One benefit of completing your essay before the deadline is that it provides you with ample time for accurate revision. In the course of writing, there are certainly tiny mistakes or punctuation errors that will occur. Proofreading and editing will help you correct those errors and present a detailed and unique essay.
Conclusion
Contrary to the opinions of some people, essay improvement is quite easy. Rather than continuously spending money by giving your essays to various platforms, you could choose to learn simple yet effective writing tricks such as those outlined above.