When we ask college professors what is the most common request they receive from their students, professions routinely return the same response: “I need help writing my essay”. Across the country and around the world, essay writing has been the bane of students’ academic lives, not because essay writing is an unprecedented challenge but because many students lack the time or the training to produce essays as quickly, efficiently, and effectively as professors assume.
Part of the reason for that is the increased burdens students today face. But another part is that students arrive on campus (or in digital classrooms) without the base-level skills in essay writing that high schools should be providing. As a result, a record number of college students end up in remedial writing courses to help build skills that high schools have failed to provide.
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Improve Your Writing Skills in Five Steps
So how can you build your essay writing skills so you can avoid remedial courses, complete essays faster, and master your college writing assignments? In this article, we’ll take a look at a few tips.
1. Write every day.
Like any skill, writing needs to be practiced to be perfected. If you write a little bit every day, you will build your skills and develop a stronger set of writing skills. It doesn’t matter what you write as long as you are putting words down on paper. Freewriting activities and journaling can be effective ways to develop your writing skills without the pressure of needing to produce a graded result.
Give yourself some space to just string words together, experiment with language, and write about things that are of interest to you. Doing so for even ten or fifteen minutes per day will help to develop powerful writing skills. You don’t have to read what you wrote later, we would even not recommend it because it is not for you to look for mistakes, it is for you to set your mind to writing.
2. Outline your essays.
Prewriting activities can seem like a waste of time and a burden, but the more work you put into your paper before you write, the faster your writing will develop when you sit down to complete the paper. Outlining an essay provides you with a roadmap that shows you how to connect the dots from point to point as you move through your paper.
By deciding ahead of time what points you will cover, what order they will appear in, and what research will support each of the points, you will be able to focus your attention during the writing process on the mechanics of writing—spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax, etc.—rather than content.
3. Practice opening strategies.
The first paragraph of your essay will make or break your paper. It sets up everything to follow and demonstrates your competency as a writer. Because the opening paragraph is so important, you should learn some effective techniques to start each paper. For example, some effective opening strategies include telling a story about your topic, using a dramatic fact or statistic, or opening with a compelling quotation.
By employing an effective opening, you will start the paper on a strong note and interest your reader. Just remember — an essay is not the right thing to be ended with a cliff-hanger, it is not another episode of “Stranger Things.” While the beginning should hook the reader, the conclusions should put everything in order.
4. Learn to love your library.
The library should be your best friend. To write a great essay, you need to have a powerful set of research to back up your thesis. Don’t leave your research to a Google search or to chance. Your school’s online library will have the resources you need to give your paper strong academic support from scholarly sources not usually available in full-text on the open web. By developing your library skills, you’ll be able to enhance your papers with stronger and more accurate information, producing better results.
5. Editing and proofreading aren’t optional.
By the time you finish drafting your paper, the last thing you probably want to do is go back and read it again to look for ways to improve. However, that’s exactly what you need to do to build a stronger essay. Editing and proofreading can help you to clarify arguments, insert missing connections, cat lingering errors, and make other improvements that can take your essay from ordinary to extraordinary.
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What If Nothing Works?
If all else fails, another option for improving your essay writing skills is to pay someone online to write your paper. Online experts from a paper writing service like WriteMyPaperHub.com can produce detailed and informative essays that show you the right way to approach any topic so you can skip the preliminaries and get closer to your own finished essay.
Paid writers produce in general higher quality essays than those who post free essays online because you usually get what you pay for. Often, paying someone to create a paper for you is the fastest way to achieve the result, and we sure everyone agrees that it is exactly what is needed sometimes. Normally, to become significantly better at doing something, we need time. But do we have that time?
When it comes to some urgent papers, scary deadlines, unexpected essays you forgot about, all you need is not your skills honed, but your assignments finalized. Many students confess that they don’t write much worse than writers from professional agencies, but they don’t have enough time for that. Being in college or university you have tons of things to tend to — personal, social, etc., no wonder that writing essays don’t always get to the tip of the “to-do list.”
Professional help can sometimes make the difference when it comes to understanding the best way to incorporate research, develop a thesis, or meet specific requirements, such as formatting styles, for an essay. Don’t be afraid to take all the help you can get.
