Writing essays is an everyday activity that students from the USA, the UK, and worldwide perform throughout their university courses. However, this task is not the easiest, especially for beginners who never had experience with academic writing in English before entering college.
The language and structure of academic writing are different from the everyday one. Moreover, students often struggle with adjusting to formatting and referencing requirements that can differ for various courses.
Many websites and online blogs offer various advice for writing essays, but this article summarizes the best of them and the easiest to implement.
1. Keep Your Structure Clear
The first and the most obvious advice for writing essays is to pay close attention to their structure. Many professional academic writers create an outline before starting the actual writing, and it is a habit that can provide helpful assistance for students too.
Hence, a summary of thoughts, reasons, and objections in the essay can help students compile their ideas and shape the future paper in mind.
The typical essay consists of the following parts, and almost everyone who wrote papers is familiar with them:
- A short introduction.
- A paragraph with the first argument.
- A paragraph with another argument.
- Feel free to add as many paragraphs as many arguments you have.
- A conclusion that provides a review for the essay body.
Still, they are easier to talk about than to stick to them perfectly while writing an essay. For example, many arguments can interlace, and it could appear more convenient to put one right after the other.
However, this approach is unsafe because the reader can be less familiar with the topic and miss their mutual connection. As a result, these arguments would look like a mixture of separate thoughts’ fragments for them. The most straightforward rule to remember to improve your writing structure is “one statement per one paragraph.”
If you need help with structuring a paper, professional essay writing services like CustomWritings provide an opportunity to place an order for your custom essay and to buy a sample of a cheap and original paper as an inspiration for the work of their customer. Asking for professional essay writing help services can significantly improve the quality of your future papers.
2. Avoid Dodging from the Main Topic
This advice is quite apparent, but many students who try academic writing from scratch for the first time still do it. It is an understandable desire to impress the reader with your erudition, especially if the topic covered is broad, but unnecessary information can worsen the final impression from the essay.
For example, if the essay topic is marine pollution and its environmental consequences locally or globally, discussing marine pollutants’ effects on human health would be unnecessary.
Moreover, reference to the personalized impression should occur in essays only when directly requested by instructions. This rule is especially important for personal opinions from situations or objects related to the topic, as academic writing favors analysis over emotions.
It is helpful to re-read each paragraph after you write it to ensure that the paper focuses on the main topic and does not deviate to side questions. Of course, this takes time, but it could help with looking for stylistic mistakes and evaluating the paragraph’s structure at the same time.
Basically, the paragraph should use the same structure criteria as the ones applied to the whole essay. The paragraph should contain only information on one sub-topic, and the author should narrate this information using a clear and consequential manner that is easy to follow.
3. Choose Your Sources Carefully
Obviously, this advice is not useful for reflective writing where the only fully reliable source is the writer. However, this assignment can occur relatively rarer than ones where the student needs to study other people’s research and formulate their own opinion on the topic.
The internet and libraries provide access to an abundance of information, but it could be not so easy to select sources that are worth the time spent reading.
However, it is possible to choose faster if you can evaluate the source’s reliability beforehand. Appropriate types of sources for most essays are the following:
- Research articles from peer-reviewed journals.
- Professional literature, such as textbooks or monographs.
- Articles and reviews from trusted media that have a high reputation, preferably known worldwide.
- Statistics and information from international organizations, like the UNESCO or the WHO.
The main similar feature of sources listed below is their credibility. Namely, they typically provide top-quality, reliable information from the expert and select it based on professional standards of scientific research or journalism, respectively.
As there is no need for previous professional training before creating a promotional article or a blog post, an unreliable service can provide outdated or dubious data or misinterpret them for marketing purposes, so it’s more helpful to stick to the trusted ones.
4. Check the Formatting
It’s the dullest part of essay writing, but it is also the final one, and the end of the road is near at that moment. So, it’s better not to skip it because proper referencing and formatting can significantly affect the final grade, and you can re-check it using a specialized website.
The first reason why professors pay attention to them is that the formatting enhances readability and makes it easier to understand the paper written. When the citation style, headings’ format, or other factors change continuously, it attracts additional attention, and the reader’s concentration on the text decreases.
Obviously, not ruining it would improve the impression from the text. The second reason for being careful while checking formatting is because it’s good attention training. Basically, professors can test a student’s ability to read the task attentively and follow instructions they gave to him.
As sticking to some business or professional writing standards can be an inevitable part of a person’s life, it’s good to start training in advance. In fact, a slightly lower grade is the worst thing that can happen with a university essay with improper formatting, while the stacks in the company can be significantly higher.
Like many other activities, essay writing is a skill that is easy to learn but hard to master. Therefore, the most important factors that you should consider while writing your essay should be its structure, the topic focus, sources’ selection, and formatting.
Lauren Bradshaw started academic writing in 2003. Since then she has tried her hand in SEO and website copywriting, writing for blogs, and working as an academic essay writer. Currently she is working for a professional essay writing company. Her major interests lie in content marketing, developing communication skills, and blogging. She’s also passionate about philosophy, psychology, literature and painting.
