College students cannot avoid essay writing even if they try to, but many struggles to write a good essay. They tend to bypass the system by seeking out the best essay writers and outsourcing their essay assignments to these professional writers. However, a few per cent of students still take the time to write their essays.
Whether you write your essay by yourself or you give it to professionals to do it for you, it’s important that you not only develop your essay writing skills, but you must also improve them quickly. Here are a few tips to help you achieve this goal:
- Read a lot
It’s a well-known writing hack that reading voraciously is the best way to get better at writing. The more you read, the better you write. So if you want to get better at essay writing, you must read many high-quality essays. This will enable you to pick up the structures and rhythms of good essays.
2. Improve your vocabulary
To improve your essay writing skills, you must have the building blocks necessary to write great essays. This refers to the English vocabulary. Developing your vocabulary is an effective way to write better essays. This doesn’t mean you have to show off by using very complicated words that are not easily understood. Instead, it means that you’ll have the right word to describe exactly what you mean in your essay.
3. Don’t start writing before knowing what you want to write about
Writing an essay isn’t as straightforward as sitting in front of a computer and typing. There are several steps you have to take. Before you type the first word, you should already know where you want to start and end the essay. You can do this easily by creating a basic outline for your essay.
The outline should be a rough sketch of your essay structure, including the introduction, essay body (the different paragraphs discussing the essay’s main points with examples and facts), and the conclusion (that connects your argument back to the thesis).
4. Develop a strong understanding of punctuation, grammar, and style
Writing an excellent essay without a basic understanding of punctuation, English grammar and style concepts is important. These are fundamentals that you must learn to enable effective communication through writing. So you have to take it seriously.
Some of the English grammar basics include correct pronoun and article use, subject & verb agreements, sentence structures, etc. Ensure that you understand how to use punctuations properly, and you can differentiate between when to use a comma and when to use a full stop.
Also, when writing academic essays, voice is extremely important. Ensure to use very concise language. Avoid using transition words without any meaningful addition to the sentence and avoid wordiness so that readers are not detracted from the argument. More than anything, ensure to use active voice as much as possible. If you can, avoid passive voice completely. This makes your essay tone more direct and clear.
5. Use sources and evidence effectively.
It’s good to have a point that you’re arguing or a claim you’re making, but what makes an essay good is that it uses evidence from other sources to back up its point. So when you’ve determined a position, you’re arguing for or against, do your research to find some evidence to support your position. This can be illustrations, statistics, and quotations.
Before adding any evidence to your essay, you must analyze it to be sure of how it helps your argument. There must be a solid connection between your point and the evidence you’re presenting.
Additionally, you must cite your sources properly. You must show where you got your evidence. This includes citing sources in the essay text or adding or bibliography or reference list at the end of your essay with all the details about the sources you used. You can ask your professors if you don’t know how to write an essay reference or check the style guide.
6. Get someone to proofread your essay.
While this may not be strictly categorized as an essay writing skill or a means to improve your skill, it’s equally as important and helps improve your essays. Once you’re done writing your essay and have done everything you feel you should do, it would help if you get someone else to proofread it before submitting it. This can be your friend, family or colleague. Getting a pair of fresh eyes to proofread your essay helps you find errors that you couldn’t point out yourself. This helps improve the overall quality of your essay, and if you take note of the errors they point out, you can avoid them in future essays, which helps you get better.
