Not everyone loves writing essays, and it’s clear why – college writing is a hard work. Some students think that writing is a skill you have to be born with, and an average student just can’t become a brilliant writer. But it’s not true!
It takes a lot of time to come up with ideas and formulate sentences and paragraphs, which will be able to reflect these ideas. However, you can learn how to become a more proficient writer and make the whole process easier. So here are 5 tips that can help you improve your college writing skills:
Practice your skills
You must’ve heard it a million times – if you want to become good at something, you should practice it. It’s a hard way, but you need to admit this fact – practice makes perfect!
So how should you practice college writing? You can write in a blog about the topics that sound interesting to you. Even if you don’t write formal essays every day, it will still help you make your writing skills better.
You’ll see – if you write at least one post every day, you’ll be able to write much faster and you won’t have that writer’s block anymore. Write about anything you like, just make sure your text is clear and doesn’t contain any mistakes.
You can also write about some interesting things you’ve learned in class. It will help you remember the course material better and at the same time polish your college writing skills.
Read more books
A great writer always reads a lot. You need to read at least one book a week. You’ll see how helpful it is. If you don’t read enough literature, you won’t have tools for writing great essays. Sometimes, it is great to follow a famous writer’s style. You can write your paper from a different perspective. Imagine, you’re Oscar Wilde or Scott Fitzgerald. How would they write such essay? Eventually, you’ll develop your own style.
If you don’t know how to write academic papers, read more professional literature. It will help you learn how to structure your essay and what kind of vocabulary to use.
Learn how to cite your sources
Some students plagiarize without even knowing it. It happens, when you don’t know about citing the sources. You always need to acknowledge and give credit to the original source, where you got the information from.
Try completing your papers in different styles to get used to them. There a lot of guides on how to cite sources using APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard. Once you learn all of them, it won’t take a lot of time to format your paper.
You can create Word Doc templates with specific formatting styles to start writing in them. You’ll have a header, page number and title page already before you even start. Also, it’s much easier to use citation generators online to format the sources faster.
Avoid clichés
You need to use academic language in your college essays. Don’t use metaphors or analogies because they can be too distracting for the reader. So forget about using cliché phrases, try to come up with something more original. Such phrases used to sound appropriate before people started to overuse them.
This is why you need to check your paper for cliché overuse after writing it. You shouldn’t think about it too much while you’re writing. You will be able to correct these words later. The most important thing is to stick to your thesis statement.
So once you’re done with the writing, you can find some cliché words and change them to make the paper sound more professional.
Proofread your paper
No one ever likes their first drafts. Because they usually sound not the way you expect. So after you finished writing your essay, take a break. You won’t be able to proofread the paper just after you finished writing, because you might not notice some mistakes.
So first, you need to read the whole paper. Does it make sense? Does it have a clear thesis statement? If yes – it’s great! If not – paraphrase the sentences which are hard to understand. Once you’re done, you can start proofreading every sentence. Check your paper for grammar and spelling mistakes. If you think a word doesn’t sound well – replace it.
Then you can read a new version of the paper. Make sure you proofread your essay as many times as needed, until it sounds perfect!
A lot of people have the same problems with essay writing in college, just like you do. But you can become a better writer by trying to follow our tips. Just practice more and believe in yourself!