Essay writing is a must-item to encounter throughout your study. It is thus crucial to familiarize yourself with the steps to writing an essay to ensure a smooth experience and quality scores in various college assignments.
This article will highlight ten tips to make your essay better, helping you overcome the common essay writing pitfalls for students.
What makes a good essay?
Before diving into the steps for writing an essay, we must define what makes an essay good. A good essay satisfies various guidelines provided by your tutor or the faculty.
Your essay should, therefore, address the given topic, meet the stipulated word count and adhere to the referencing style recommended by your tutor. Contrary to popular belief, a good essay does not imply stuffing your paper with jargon.
Like any written work, a good essay ought to be easily readable, allowing your reader to make out your key arguments without confusion. When working on your essay writing skills, consider reaching out to non-experts, to establish how well your readers familiarize with various ideas in your paper.
What are the steps of writing an essay?
Developing a logical approach to essay writing is key among various essay writing techniques. Unlike freewriting, organized writing allows you to gauge the completeness of your work and to gauge the flow of your arguments.
This reduces challenges in the latter stages of your writing and also ensures quality performance in your essay. Some of the steps for writing an essay include:
- Topic selection
Topic selection bears much primacy in your essay writing. Besides ensuring the relevance of your topic to your assignment, the proper selection makes for simple research, allowing you to exhaust various arguments contained within your paper.
When selecting an essay topic, start by checking the trending issues in your field to ensure unique insight and overcome plagiarism.
- Research
After selecting your topic, conduct research to identify the key arguments and research gaps within the selected topic. Research should also familiarize you with the existing arguments within the topic, offering you a wider perspective for your discussion.
- Outlining
After researching your topic, organize your ideas and sort them into sections for a smooth flow of your arguments. Your outline should highlight the key arguments in your paper, sorting each key idea within an individual paragraph in your essay.
The outline allows you to gauge the completeness of your arguments and to check your work upon completing your essay.
- Drafting and editing
Finally, draft your essay while using the necessary connections to link various arguments within your paper. Also, take time to edit your paper, to ensure that the essay is in accordance with various guidelines that were provided by your tutor.
How to make your essays better: 10 tips for improving essay writing
Having covered the steps for writing an essay, let’s dive into the writing techniques for essays.
- Hone your outlining skills
Outlining is a vital skill for writing your essays. Before writing your essay, you are required to prepare an outline that highlights the flow of arguments within your essay. Afterward, develop a reverse outline to gauge the final paper and diagnose the errors that should be fixed to ensure the coherence of your arguments.
- Practice
Regular practice is essential in improving your writing skills. Besides helping you familiarize yourself with the order of academic essays, practice allows you to express your ideas better, having an easier time with subsequent papers. Also, regular practice helps you identify your weaknesses, improving your writing over time.
- Read existing essays
Like practice, existing essays are a vital tool in improving your essay writing skills. Ideally, check the essays from senior students to compare their prompts, written essays, and feedback from the tutor, therefore, adopting the changes recommended in their work.
You could also seek an essay rubric to check the parameters that define a quality paper, ensuring optimal performance within your papers.
- Learn how to research
Research often makes up the spine of your essay structure. The key to acing academic tasks is to conduct quality research to cover all aspects of your research paper. As such, familiarize yourself with various academic databases to easily locate credible sources on which to base your research.
- Edit your work ruthlessly
After writing your paper, commit ample time to edit your work, ensuring that it satisfies various guidelines provided by your tutor. Your editing should be stepwise, examining one aspect of essay writing at a time.
- Keep it simple
Ideally, use simple language in your paper to avoid confusion. Preferably, limit your topic terminologies to the keywords learned in class, allowing people to easily make out the ideas that you have learned within the course.
Avoid the urge to ‘impress’ your tutor with verbosity as this may result in penalties that limit your performance.
- Accustom yourself to the steps for writing an essay
Another key step to writing your essay is to familiarize yourself with various writing steps. Doing this will allow you to manage your essays with ease without falling into common essay writing traps that hinder student performance.
- Master the skills to hook your reader
The introduction ranks as the most crucial part of your essay. It is therefore crucial to master the skills to write your introduction and clarify the essay objectives, and the structure of your essay, giving the reader a gist of the ideas contained within your paper.
- Seek help from a tutor
Seeking help is a key approach for improving your essay writing fast. Expert help allows you to overcome common errors and gain an academic tone for your essays.
- Embrace feedback from your tutor
Although some feedback may seem harsh, we recommend that you take all criticism positively and change your writing practices over time. Also, make use of this feedback to guide your practice, thus adopting optimal writing approaches.
