A lot of students don’t like writing essays. There are some reasons, why they struggle with a writing process:
- It’s very time consuming.
- It requires not only to write a paper, but to do extensive research as well.
- You don’t receive enough feedback to improve your writing.
- Students usually procrastinate, so they have to finish their writing just before the deadline.
Writing an essay seems a simple thing to do from someone else’s perspective – you just write those 2-3 pages and that’s it. In fact, you need to spend a lot of hours to produce a good paper, that will be clear for the reader. You have to check the instructions, find enough academic sources, read them and understand them. Then you need to create a thesis statement, come up with ideas to support your argument and write a conclusion based on your sources and the main argument.
Many people hate to write, because they’re not particularly good at it. It takes them a lot of time to write even one paragraph. So it’s understandable that they hate the whole process of staring at the blank sheet of paper. They start to procrastinate and end up writing their assignment two hours before the deadline.
You don’t have to be born with natural writing talent. Some people are more creative than others, but all of them have to work hard to become great writers. So if you want to be a decent writer, don’t think you can’t succeed because of the lack of talent. You can write much better and stop hating on your writing assignments, if you follow these tips:
Plan your work
You can start by writing a small “to do” list – for example:
- Read the sources.
- Write about #1.
- Write about #2.
- Etc.
Check the sources with your research question in mind
If you need to write a book review and answer a particular question, start reading and think about the question that needs to be answered. If you notice some parts of the text, which can be useful to answer the question, write down a page number.
Create an outline for the paper
Decide what you’re going to write about. Usually, five unique sentences are enough for the whole essay. Then, you just need to frame your ideas around those sentences. So write down your main ideas, it will be much easier to write an essay after you do it.
Write a rough draft
All the first drafts sound terrible. You get frustrated because when you read your essay, it doesn’t sound the way you wanted. So no wonder you start to hate a writing process. But all the great writers had their first drafts too! Don’t worry about the quality of your rough draft, revise it and you’ll see how it starts to sound much better.
Make your paper interesting for yourself
Maybe not all the assignments are particularly interesting for you, but you should try to write your paper for yourself, not the professor. If you write just to please someone else – it’s not going to work. So try to read more about the topic, maybe you’ll find it much more exciting after you find out more information.
Be creative
Remember that you don’t have to simply repeat your professor’s ideas in the paper. You might think your instructor won’t like other points of view, but it’s not true. Professors are tired of reading the same essays all the time. Imagine if you had to see the same ideas every semester. You wouldn’t like it for sure. So try to think about your topic in a different way! It will be more fun, and you will probably stop hating your assignment so much.
Take a break
After you finish the first page of your essay, you can reward yourself and take a break. Just don’t start procrastinating. You can have fun for 10-15 minutes, and then get back to work. The more efforts you put into writing, the faster you’ll finish.
Practice
You can’t do anything better than just start practicing your skills. Once you get really good at writing essays, you won’t hate them so much. You will enjoy the process and finish writing much faster. Write something every day, post some interesting information on your blog or Facebook and you’ll see the improvements.
You can do it! Stop worrying and panicking, when you hear a word “essay”. Start believing in yourself. If you become a better writer, all this hate you feel will simply disappear. You just need to relax and look at the whole writing process from another point of view. Essay writing is a challenging task, but such challenges can only make you better.