How to Improve Essay Writing Skills
Many students face difficulties when dealing with their writing assignments. Alongside, they find it challenging to create a better essay than a previous one. The deal is that when you are writing essays regularly, create a set of rules or some kind of formula for all your next papers. So, how is it possible to improve essay writing skills? How to create not good but brilliant paper?
Get to know 5 useful and practical skills for better essays. They will surely help you to complete papers and impress everybody.
Read the Essays Written by Other People
It seems to be a pretty good idea. Do you know why? Reading different books written by prominent authors can influence your writing style greatly, can`t it? The same is about reading other people`s essays. You will analyze what you like or dislike concerning this or that essay, and keep in mind what is good to use in your own paper.
It would be great for you to have some time to read essays written by your peers, fellow-students and academics. Read different types of essays and of different learning areas, not necessarily only that one you are involved in. The broader your outlook is, the better your essay is.
However, keep in mind that these essays should be like etalons or valuable examples for you to follow. Try to be critical and evaluate everything written there.
Also, you can find pretty good essay examples in the broadsheet newspapers. It would be interesting for you to see how writers supported their ideas, provided arguments etc. All essays you are reading should be of the top-quality and balanced. The main goal of all this is to take the best that writers used and to learn some useful techniques which will help while writing an essay of your own.
Build Your Vocabulary and Learn How to Use It Properly
This will help you to develop a skill of expressing own thoughts clearly and concisely. A good essay is characterized by proper word choice and its economy as well. Readers prefer to read a condensed information expressed clearly rather than long and rambling points of view.
If you to want to become a confident writer and impress everybody with your talking extremely to the point, you should always work on your advanced vocabulary enrichment. Of course, there are always a lot of new words to learn, and they surely help to convey a proper meaning accurately. It also enables you to be more persuasive in your essays.
Ways to enrich your vocabulary:
- Subscribe to a ‘word a day’ email. You will get a new word each day, so create a separate folder in your inbox and put all messages with new words there. It will help you learn new words, have them all together and use them whenever possible.
- Read more. If you are reading, you are facing some new words. Don’t hesitate to look up those words in the dictionary. By doing this you will not only learn new words, you will also know how to use them in relation to the context. Reading different articles and books will not only add to your general knowledge level but widen your vocabulary as well.
- Learn prefixes, suffixes and roots. It may seem a little boring but you will benefit from this in a lot of ways. This will help you to learn a great number of new words and build them up.
- Create a vocabulary book. It is a usual thing for those studying a foreign language. So, why don’t you start a vocabulary book of your native tongue? Buy a notepad and put down there some new words with their definitions. The process of writing everything down will increase your chances to memorize those words. It is also a good idea to divide all your vocabulary into sections, for example, words related to history, science etc.
Make Up Your Mind Before Writing
You are always told a plan and essay outline before writing. That really works. However, even before planning something, you need to know what argument and point of view you are going to discuss. Having come up with key ideas, you can build a plan for your essay right from the introduction to the conclusion. Try to make a short summary of what you intend to write in your essay, why it should make the readers interested and what are the goals of your assignment.
Provide Opinions of Other People
An essay is a good way to show how intelligent you are. So, do not miss the opportunity to quote some famous people and original sources concerning the topic you are working with. It is possible that you do not agree with this or that saying. So, do not hesitate to express your point of view. Different views and discussions show that you are able to perceive and analyze the information.
In order to be well-prepared, create a separate page in your notebook for each subject you are studying, and write down there all prominent personalities, alongside with their achievements. It will be a quick way to refer in case of necessity.
However, you shouldn’t quote too much. Don’t forget to express your point of view more. Don’t make the readers think that you are using other people`s sayings just to avoid providing your own thoughts.
Grammar, Syntax and Punctuation
You may not pay too much attention to these points while writing. However, these things do influence the whole picture of the essay you are writing. Actually, sentence structures show on your intelligence level. You know that the most important task is to write your essay properly and make it readable and understandable for readers.
It is good to use sentences of different types and lengths. However, do not make them too long. Readers can lose their understanding, while they don’t need to read a sentence twice to grasp the meaning. Effective and accurate punctuation is also important here.
If speaking about the tone of voice, it all depends on the essay type and your teachers` specifications. You can write your essay either in Passive or Active Voice. So, before start working on your paper, always check the requirements.
Hope these tips were quite useful for your and they will help you to create only better essays all the time. Keep on trying!
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