Can’t figure out how to come up with a great idea for your next essay writing? Coming up with a well-researched essay requires you to have excellent writing skills as well as a good grasp of the necessary content optimization techniques.
Depending on your level of understanding and expertise, you may be acquainted with some of those and in the dark about others. But don’t worry.
In this post, we’re going to be discussing five tips that you can keep in mind the next time you have to write an essay. With these five tips in mind, you will be able to make your work look authoritative and expertly written.
5 Essay Writing Tips for Students
When you want to write a high-quality essay, you have to make sure that you do everything correctly, right from the research phase to the final editing.
In light of the above, the tips that we’re going to be discussing are also going to cover not only the writing process but also the routine that precedes it (i.e., the research) and the one that succeeds it (i.e., the editing and optimizing).
Spread your research over multiple sources
When you want to gather information for your essay, don’t stick to a single source. Always spread it out over multiple ones, i.e., websites, research papers, books, existing essays, and the like.
There are basically two benefits of spreading your research over multiple sources.
- It helps you to avoid committing accidental plagiarism.
- It helps you to collect useful and valuable data.
Let’s explain these both briefly before moving on.
Accidental plagiarism is the type of duplication that can occur in a write-up without the knowledge and intent of the author. Such plagiarism is common in the online world, where there is a ton of material available from existing sources.
So, if you keep your research limited to a single website or a single article, you can pick up the writing style as well as the type of facts mentioned in it. Then, when coming up with your own work, you can start mimicking that writing style or type of facts without realizing it.
Similarly, we mentioned above that spreading your research out on multiple sources can help you to collect useful and valuable data. This basically means that when you use more than one source for gathering information, you’re able to accumulate a formidable stockpile of facts, particulars, statistics and details about your topic.
There can be some stuff that may have been overlooked by the author of a particular article or research paper and that has subsequently been mentioned in another online source. By diversifying your research, you will be able to find and learn those
types of details.
Create an outline first for essay writing
To understand the importance of creating an outline for your essay, take the example of an architect who says to his client, “Hey, you know what? Let’s call the construction company and get started on making your house. “I’ll think of the design as we go along.”
…would you want such an ‘architect’ handling your project?
No, you wouldn’t.
To come up with an authoritative, well-rounded essay, you have to create an outline beforehand. And after making the outline, you also have to meticulously follow it so that you don’t go off-track.
This is basically the main purpose of creating an outline. It helps you stay focused on the topic at hand, and it prevents you from deviating from the main point. Mind you; you should create an outline for your essay even if you are instructed by your institute to only include an introduction, main body, and conclusion in it.
If this happens to be the case, your outline will be an abstract guide for you that you will use to get an idea of the concepts and ideas that you have to cover. On the other hand, if your institute has given you free rein with regard to the formatting of the essay, you can use the points in your outline as headings and sub-headings.
Keep Your Writing Concise and Easy to Understand
When writing your content, you have to keep a delicate balance. You have to keep your content concise, i.e., by using descriptive and comprehensive words, but at the same time, you have to keep it easy to understand.
Since we’re talking about two different things here, let’s demonstrate them both one by one.
To understand how you can keep your writing concise, take this example:
“The person with a lot of built-up muscles walked fast to the dog who was taking cover in fear.”
This sentence is not really something you’d find in an essay, but we’re using it to make a point.
So, as you can see above, the message that the sentence conveys is simple. But, the length of the sentence itself is needlessly stretched. In order to make it concise, we could simply write it like this:
“The brawny man strode to the cowering dog.”
This is half the length of the original sentence and is much more concise.
As we mentioned earlier, while you have to make your writing concise, you also have to keep it easy to understand. In the example above, the altered version of the sentence is concise, but it will be hard to understand for a person who does not know what the words ‘brawny’, ‘strode’, and ‘cowering’ mean.
We can, therefore, write the sentence as follows:
“The brawny man walked fast to the scared dog.”
In this version, the sentence is concise, but at the same time, it is not very hard to understand.
While writing the main body of your essay, you have to know how to balance your words and sentences so that they look mature and professional but are easily readable.
Let’s look at another example here before moving on to the next point. This time, we’ll write some type of content that you can find in an essay:
“After the study was carefully studied, the results produced by the observations of the researchers were found to be untrue.”
This sentence is, as you can see, needlessly wordy. We can make it concise by writing it like this:
“A perusal of the study evinced the fallacy of the researchers’ observations.”
But, while this is more concise, it’s not easily understandable. We can adjust it a little, as shown below:
“A perusal of the study showed that the observations of the researchers were false.”
Check and Fix Plagiarism
Plagiarism is one of the most lethal and dangerous elements that can come into your essay. They can waste your efforts and get your essay either rejected or branded with an ‘F’.
In most cases, educational institutes have certain policies about plagiarism. There is a specific limit, e.g., 10% or 15% of plagiarism allowed in the submissions. If the limit is crossed, then the student is given a penalty.
Some institutes are very strict in this regard. They can either suspend the student or even go as far as to expel them.
To avoid facing such repercussions, you have to make sure that your final submission is completely free from plagiarism. Or, if there is some present, it should be below the limit chalked out by your institute.
If, after checking for plagiarism, you find a big chunk of your essay as duplicated, you can do one of three things:
- Remove the plagiarized parts altogether
- Quote it
- Paraphrase it
As far as the first two steps go, they are only possible if the parts showing up as plagiarized are not vital and pivotal for explaining any concept in the essay. In other words, if a passage containing some sort of redundant detail is found to be plagiarized, you can easily remove plagiarism or quote it.
But, if the plagiarized sentences are necessary and essential for the overall integrity of the essay, then you will have to resort to paraphrasing.
You can paraphrase your content yourself by altering it manually. However, the drawback of this method is that it takes time. If you want to make things quicker, you can paraphrase online with the help of a dedicated tool instead.
The benefit of using a paraphrasing tool online, other than the speedy results, is that they can produce smart outputs. If you choose the right one for the job, it can even give you such a paraphrased output that you may find it hard to come up with yourself.
Check and Fix Grammar/Spelling Errors
Everyone makes grammar and spelling errors, be it a student in the 9th grade or a professor completing his PhD. But, while it is normal for one to make these errors, it’s not acceptable to let them go by as such.
When you finish writing your essay, you have to check it for grammar/spelling errors. There are two main ways in which you can do this.
To begin with, you have to proofread your content a couple of times yourself. A lot of errors and mistakes can be spotted during this process. However, when proofreading, you should not do it instantly after you’re done writing. Rather, you should give it some time, i.e., around an hour.
Waiting for a little before proofreading the essay with help you forget the exact words and phrases you wrote. When that happens, you will be able to go through the essay more objectively.
Moving on, other than manually proofreading the content, you can also use a grammar and punctuation checker to find and remove grammar/spelling errors.
The benefit of using this type of software is that it can help you find any mistakes that you may have missed during the proofreading phase.
Conclusion
When it comes to writing an essay, your initial focus should be on three things: using authentic information, removing all types of errors, and making it easier to read. These three things comprehensively encompass a lot of different optimization steps and techniques.
And that is pretty much what our discussion covered in this post. By doing proper research, you can make your content look authentic and authoritative. Then, by simplifying your writing, you can make it easier to read. And last but not least, by removing grammar errors and plagiarism, you can polish your essay before finalizing it.
