While essay writing can be challenging even for students who’re good with words, it has become an obligatory academic writing assignment irrespective of one’s institution. That means you must master the art of writing a great essay regardless of your level of education.
To be clear, essay writing isn’t about putting words on paper and hitting the word limit for an essay. It goes from that to picking the right outline to proper editing before final submission.
That’s why we feel it’s important to give you some essay writing tips that you can use to write a high quality essay that can earn you the best scores.
So here we go:
Effective Essay Writing Tips for College Students
1. Read and Understand the Questions
It won’t matter how interesting or how long your essay is. If it’s not written based on the question, all your hard work will mean nothing to your instructor.
So even before you get down to research and create an outline, read and understand the essay question.
By reading and understanding the questions, you know what your instructor actually needs you to cover.
Does the question require you to write an argumentative essay?
Does it place in a position of writing a theory of knowledge essay?
Does the question require you to go deeper on cause and effect?
Or does the brief require you to work on a compare and contrast essay?
Read the brief to identify the common phrases that highlight your instructor’s expectations.
For instance, theoretical approaches require understanding of the theory and related approaches, with a proper highlight of strength and weaknesses and a justified conclusion.
On compare and contrast essay, your focus should be solidly on the theories you have to evaluate. Demonstrate that you understand both sides of the theory in-depth and how it can be applied.
In general, reading the wordings in the brief to understand the type of the essay. This will make it easy for you to develop the right approach on research, template, and writing.
2. Plan Ahead and Schedule Properly
If you wait until the very last minute to write your essay, chances are you won’t score the best grades at all. After all, a last minute rush is a perfect recipe for failure – and that’s no secret.
Since there’s a lot to writing an essay than just putting words, working on the assignment on the last minutes, which calls for staying up late in the night, can earn you the most disappointing grades in the end.
Therefore, the best thing to do is to start early. There’s really no other better way to get down to writing a good piece, except to start planning, scheduling, and writing the very moment you receive the assignment.
Even better, challenge yourself by setting your own deadline. If possible, make it a day or two before the actual submission date set by your instructor. If it helps, you can even create an essay-writing timetable to make it easier for you to complete the work in time. A typical table can look something such as the following.
If you have a schedule template like the one above, you won’t have too much work to do before the date to hand in the work. We advise that you finish the first draft at least three or four days before the deadline. This will give you ample time to proofread your work before the final submission.
3. Make the Essay Easy to Read
There’s nothing wrong with expressing how versed you’re with English vocabularies. But unless you’re writing an essay for fun, avoid using ambiguous words that your instructor will struggle to understand.
If your essay demands a dictionary and a cup of coffee on the table, your instructor might as well skip it to another paper or worse award you an F give or take.
While it sounds like a silly advice to give a college or university student, you should write your essay using a simple language that even a nonprofessional can understand. After all, some instructors skim read the essay to check if you understand the topic and the writing style guideline.
You want to make sure your essay includes key points, while being as simple to read as possible. Make sure the message is very clear. Delete irrelevant words and phrase, make sure the essay goes straight to the point, and the message is concise.
4. Insert Transitions Between Paragraphs
Have you ever read an essay and felt like the connection between the next paragraphs and the previous are far too off? This is a common writing problem many students struggle with, and it’s not a recommended approach to essay writing.
Essays have to be precise and with a good flow. The connection between the last paragraph and the next should be coherent, and the flow should come in naturally.
Therefore, use transition words to give your essay a better flow. Phrases such as “regarding this, to put it briefly, and despite the argument”, can add clear bridges between paragraphs and make your essay easy to read and understand.
5. Seek Professional Academic Writing Help
Sometimes the essay assignment comes at a time when you have too much to handle. You look at the deadline and you can’t help but get overwhelmed. But instead of jamming up your schedule for the week and spending sleepless nights researching and reading, you can seek for professional academic writing help.
At Help for Assessment, our goal is to help you to analyze, understand, and complete your essay project in time. You can check our essay writing service here for more information.
What makes us unique from the other academic writing services on the Internet is that we’re more interested in providing academic guidance to help you start and complete the assignment yourself. That’s to say you shouldn’t treat the paper we send to you as your final assignment. Instead, it should be a source of inspiration build to help you come up with your own draft and finally a proofread paper ready for submission to your instructor.