Writing essays is a major challenge impacting the lives of college students, many of whom face moments where an essay could determine the success of their college careers. Indeed, it’s quickly becoming a crisis because a growing number of students are arriving on campus without the skills they need to write academically at the college level. The reason for that is depressing: High schools are devoting less time to teaching the skills students will need in college in order to meet standardized testing requirements. The result is that students’ writing skills are suffering at a time when students need strong writing skills more than ever. Indeed, oral and written communication skills are among the top attributes that employers want in new hires—and they are the skills too many educators are neglecting in the rush to maximize standardized testing scores.
In this article provided by the following academic essay writing service SmartWritingService.com with an experienced team of professional academic writers, we’ll take a look at eight effective ways to improve your academic writing skills to succeed in college and university studies.
Read as Many Essays as Possible
To become a great writer, you must first become a great reader. The more you read great essays, the more likely you’ll be to absorb the rhythms and structure of quality writing. That doesn’t mean reading your classmates’ papers. Instead, read professional essays like those collected each year in the “Best Essays” anthologies that many publishers produce to highlight essays and other nonfiction pieces so you can see the right way to write great essays.
Develop Your Vocabulary
To make your academic writing more effective, you need to have the foundational skills for great essays. When you develop your vocabulary, you can produce stronger and more effective essays. A bigger vocabulary doesn’t always mean that you should jump to the biggest word just to show off. Instead, it means having the depth of knowledge to pick the right word to convey your exact meaning every time.
Develop Your Writing Mechanics
A great essay achieves greatness when it is clear, fluid, and grammatically correct. The stronger your basic essay writing mechanics are, the more effective your essays will be. Many schools provide services to help build mechanical skills in grammar, spelling, punctuation, organization, style, clarity, and flow. When you enhance your understanding of the fundamentals, you will be able to write more powerful papers that will allow you to more easily pile higher-level analytical and reasoning atop a strong foundation.
Take Advantage of Your Library
Every school has a library, and your school’s library is a gateway to high-level academic research that can make your paper stronger and more effective. Great academic writers don’t rely only on search engines like Google for their research. You will need academic research of the kind you can only get through scholarly databases that your library can provide you access to for free. Your library’s librarians are important resources who can help you to find resources and research topics so you can produce more effective essays.
Master the Art of Transitions
Academic writing that reads fluidly is more likely to receive a higher grade than writing that seems disjointed. One way to make sure your essays are smooth is to master the art of transitions. These are the words and phrases that link paragraphs and sections together to lead the reader smoothly from one thought to the next. Words like “however,” “additionally,” “consequently,” or “by contrast” can show the reader how new paragraphs connect to the one before. There are many different ways to transition, so having a range of options to use can make your papers stronger.
Develop an Outline Before You Start Writing Your Essay
Studies have shown that writing an outline before you begin writing your essay will not only improve your paper but also help you to write it faster. Outlining helps you to work through the organization and development of your essay and to choose what you will write about and in what order before you start writing so you won’t have to stop and think about what comes next. This allows you to focus on the actual writing of the paper rather than the content as you produce your draft, creating a stronger and more fluid writing process from start to finish. The more effort you put into your outline, the easier and faster writing your draft will become.
Remember to Save Time to Revise and Proofread
Finishing your first draft doesn’t mean that you’ve reached the end of the writing process. It’s important to save time to review your first draft to make changes and improvements. You should block off an hour or two to read your paper again, once to review the content and the clarity of the paper, making corrections as needed, and then a second pass to catch mechanical and formatting errors. A clean, polished final paper is more likely to make a good impression.
Consider Getting Professional Writing Help
Seeking professional help from academic essay writing services can be a great way to improve your papers. Using custom-written papers from online services can be a fast and cheap way to skip the challenges of essay writing and achieve a better result more quickly. A custom essay is typically written by a qualified expert writer according to the specific essay question and requirements that you provide so you can see how an expert would create your paper.