Why do students want to improve their essay writing? If you google, you will see that there are almost no requests about how to write better speeches, or how to be better in lab work, etc.
The most important part of the academic process is writing, and it starts with essay writing. You cannot write a good research paper later if now you don’t know how to write a quality essay. It is just impossible. Essay writing teaches students crucial things:
- To choose a relevant topic. It is not that easy as you may think, as you need to find something at the intersection of your interests and topic discussed in class. If you just take the first random topic, you may struggle with research and further writing, as it won’t interest you at all. Also, professors often want students to explain why they have chosen a particular topic, and it is another good skill to improve.
- To do research. Good research is not the research that takes too much time, it is the research which in the optimum amount of time, brings maximum results. When doing research for essays you create a database of relevant sources, look through different online libraries, work in your library on campus, etc. You learn how to read faster, skip not relevant studies, and separate academically valid information from some irrelevant facts.
- To formulate thoughts in a clear and concise manner. This skill is more than required in daily life, especially in a professional environment, and essay writing is a great tool to strengthen it. Being able to formulate your ideas in a specific form now losing the logic of narration, putting arguments in the needed order, is a huge bonus to your other professional skills and strengths.
- To establish discipline. Essay writing is all about discipline, what many students learn the hard way. The biggest mistake is to think that you can write that essay in a few hours, just before the deadline, with all the formatting, research, citing, etc. It never works well. So, essay writing teaches planning, counting time, and having plan B for emergency situations. For someone, plan B is to invent the most outstanding “sick leave” story, for someone to address a paper writing service like WriteMyPaperHub with a simple “write my essays” request.
We’ve listed the whole bunch of reasons why improving essay writing skills is so important. Let’s talk about how to do it.
1. Invest arduously in your vocabulary and use it
While the first thing you have to think when it comes to essay writing is structure, we want to start with vocabulary enlarging. It is more important than you think. When you have a rich vocabulary and know how to employ it correctly, you get into the flow and can write a paper much faster.
Also, professors consider developed vocabulary used in essays as a good addition to the mark. Even if you don’t come up with some exceptional ideas, but express your arguments eloquently, using good metaphors and suitable vocabulary, it gives you more points. Use thesaurus, use websites which help to find synonyms, own an actual English dictionary, like Merriam Webster, and spend some time reading it once in a while.
It is also a good idea to have a small online or offline dictionary and write down some interesting words and phrases. By the way, with which word would you replace a boring word “interesting” in the previous sentence?
2. Read short stories, essays and newspaper columns
When they say you need to read more to write better, they are right. However, if you want to improve your essay writing, quickly focus on small literary forms.
They resemble essays by structure. While reading novels and technical articles will help you with words and phrases, only short stories, essays, and columns can teach you to formulate your thoughts in a concise and logical manner.
Journalists don’t have hundreds of pages to express themselves, which means they have to squeeze all the information into limited volume without losing context, facts, and readers’ interest. Isn’t it a helpful skill for essay writing as well?
3. Write an outline to every essay you work on
And finally, we are coming to a planning issue because writing an outline is not only about research, it is about planning your writing and disciplining your thoughts. Create an outline simultaneously with doing research.
Write a brief outline first, and later, when you find some relevant links, some necessary citations, put them into the corresponding part of the outline. Describe every entry with a brief statement.
This way, when you finish research, you will have not only the outline itself but a full writing plan with lots of ideas and references ready to become in-text citations. It will save you hours of time. Essay writing is all about discipline, remember?
4. Make “morning pages” practice part of your day
Don’t look at us as we offer you something illegal. Yes, all those “morning pages,” “magic morning” practices may sound cheesy, but they really come in handy when it comes to essay writing. Practice makes perfect. And you cannot practice on actual academic essays because they are graded tasks, and experiments are not always welcome.
To become much more comfortable with writing itself, we recommend writing three pages a day about anything you want. You can even write, “I hate writing, and here is why” every day. Soon, you will notice that the process itself causes much less reluctance and resistance.
5. Learn from your own mistakes even when it hurts
When students get their essays back and see the professor’s remarks, they prefer to put it aside and never see it again. The mark is already there, why to bother? But you actually should bother. The fastest and easiest way to improve your essay writing is to meticulously analyze all the mistakes you make, find patterns, and improve them.
It is proven that we follow the same pattern of mistakes. You don’t write everything wrong, you just have some repeating omissions and problems with grammar. Find out which and look for them first when proofreading your upcoming essays.
