Essay writing is a challenge for everyone, no matter how much expertise a student or a professional writer has. The process requires both diligence and creativity, which are sometimes very hard to combine. Here we share some non-trivial tips for making your essays better. Forget about the introduction, body, and conclusion advice or rules for composing a thesis statement (we all know them, right?). Here you’ll find quite a different approach to essay writing progress.
Never skip the interpretation phase
Most problems with essay writing start at the very onset of the writing process, as soon as you rush to writing the paper without even thinking about the essay question properly. Amid pressing deadlines or at the threshold of exams, such haste is reasonable as everyone wishes to complete as many tasks as possible.
But stopping for only a couple of minutes to interpret the question never killed anybody. Interpretation allows students to:
- Save much wasted time
- Get a clear idea of what the question is getting at
- Understand what the tutor really wants to see in the assignment
- Involve personal ideas to make the work more interesting
As you can see, interpreting the question allows a good start of the writing process, so it’s great to dedicate even 5-10 minutes to this stage to get things moving faster afterward.
Think like a tutor
To distinguish a good from a great essay writer, one should be able to get the full picture. Many students adopt a limited approach to essay writing by interpreting the task word by word, while, in fact, the tutor may look for entirely different content. Stop for a moment and realize one thing: tutors give essay assignments for a reason. These essays are a part of the larger whole, which is a course of studies or some lecture you need to understand, interpret, and apply to some real-life scenarios.
Thus, instead of writing some self-obvious facts and arguments in your essay, look for connections with your current study material. Think of how to apply the learning concepts and unite them into frameworks – such work looks more competent, more in-depth, and more analytical, bringing you higher grades and superb writing quality.
Always keep the structure in mind
When speaking about structure, we don’t mean the introduction, body, and conclusion of your essay. Let’s get into the deeper structure of an essay few students manage to embrace, at least at the initial stages of their educational process. The essay question usually has its own structure, which you should understand and analyze before responding to it.
Things to understand include:
- The number of components in the question
- The weight you should give to each one in the essay text
Top universities of the world (e.g., the University of London and Harvard) explicitly note that the highest grades are awarded to students who manage to reveal the subtlety, complexity, and possible disagreements in the essay question. At the same time, average marks are given to students following an obvious line and answering the question uncritically.
Thus, when writing a response to some seemingly simple question, like “Is democracy always compatible with individual freedom,” think broader, apply different theories, compare and contrast approaches to arrive at a profoundly critical and research-informed opinion.
Know when to ask for help
Studies can get really tough at times, especially when you need to compose an essay on a topic you hate or don’t understand. Is it a good option to lose several days of precious time trying to get to grips with the subject? Not exactly, as you can delegate that assignment to PaperWriter.com and proceed to write more engaging essays.
Treat research seriously
Research is the basis of all academic writing. You can’t do without it, as stating something without evidence is always a risky affair. You may be accused of either over-generalization or plagiarism, both of which are bad. So, to produce an informed, substantiated paper, always research the field and find relevant facts, theories, and empirical studies.
The core skill for quick and competent research for essay writing is purposeful reading. It’s not what you do when reading a book for leisure; you read for finding specific bits of content supporting or expanding your ideas. To achieve this, you should have a clear list of key concepts and statements you want to include in the essay. Search the literature by using them as keywords, and the process will go smoother.
Improve your content
Going beyond the simple structure considerations is hard, as most students outline without understanding what each component of the structure is meant for. Advanced tips for making essay writing more relaxed and more enjoyable are: strive for simplicity and economy.
Simplicity may be achieved at the level of sentences and words. Keep sentences relatively short by avoiding complex relationships and clauses. Whenever necessary, you can insert logical transitions to show your firm grasp of syntax. However, it’s always vital to double-check that the rhythm of your sentence and its punctuation convey the meaning correctly. Simplicity in words is achieved when we avoid complex, abstruse language. So, double-check your vocabulary to make sure it is clear and compelling.
Achieving conciseness in writing is always a sign of style improvement. Great writers make greater clarity by using language economically, attaining greater persuasiveness of writing at the same time. Revisit your sentences to see where the redundant phrases and words hide; this will make your writing process way more interesting.
Proofread in steps
The biggest mistake is to rush with essay submission once you have completed the final sentence. Professional advice separates writing and editing as you need time to shift from the role of a writer to that of a critical, detached editor. Proofread your essay in steps, first checking whether the final variant suits all your ideas and reflects your flow of thought correctly. After that, take some time and return to the essay text to check it mechanically, for typos and syntactic errors. After these steps are complete, you can submit the paper for the supervisor’s revision.
As you can see, style improvement has no end; it’s a process through which you should go every day when writing essays. Stick to our tips, try them in practice, and you’ll see how your writing improves day by day.