As any college student quickly realizes, the ability to write an essay can be a deciding factor that can affect how well their college career is going to be.
Whether you are a student that is studying abroad or has traveled within your own country to study for higher learning, establishing English-language essay writing skills with help from these effective techniques can get you prepared to handle the heavy academic lifting needed to rise to the head of your class.
Keep Reading Essays
In the same way that a great chef needs to know how dynamic culinary dishes should look, smell, and taste from extensive experience, the same can be said for improving your writing skills; if you want to write well, you should read the work of people that write well.
Becoming a voracious reader can help you get familiar with the structure of fantastic essays and the rhythm of the words.
Look for the “Best Of” anthologies by respected publishers to get exposed to quality essays and the ways in which they are written.
Follow Your Thesis
Your thesis statement is made up of one or two sentences of your introduction that state what your position is on the topic that you are writing about.
Clearly put, your thesis statement is the essence of your paper because it is the whole point that you spend the rest of the essay trying to prove to your readers, with every other paragraph revolving around this central thought.
Your professors will evaluate your essay, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, to see how well you remain on topic and relate your words to the core idea that you are arguing in your essay.
Be honest with yourself and make sure that you have clearly introduced your thesis state in the introductory paragraphs, the body of your essay supports your thesis statement, and your conclusion. Does your conclusion show how you have proven your thesis statement?
Develop Your Vocabulary
Strengthening your essay writing talent means that you have improved upon the building blocks to construct essays, which includes expanding your English vocabulary.
That doesn’t mean being able to use the biggest words that the language has to offer that may confuse people, but having a strong enough vocabulary that enables you to use the right words at the right time to spice up the reading experience.
Create an Outline
Improve your writing before the bulk of the work even gets started by building yourself an outline for your essay first.
Outlining lets you organize your information and identify what to include and exclude.
Your fully developed outline will be your roadmap to writing your paper more effectively and faster than if you were just improvising your ideas.
While you are in the outline process and you are getting your ideas down on the page, be sure to use The Word Counter tool, especially with your essay probably having a word count limit that you must adhere to.
The Word Counter does more than count your words as you are writing; it also has grammar and word comparison tools to use.
Improve Your Techniques
Academic essays must be clear and informative but also grammatically correct.
If you are struggling with your writing mechanics, don’t give up or assume that other people are just born better than you.
Help is available for you to be your best through school tutorials, online training, or writing resources to get better with spelling, grammar, style, punctuation, organization, flow, and clarity.
Create Transitions
Give your essays the greatest chance to be graded highly and to be read by many more curious minds by making sure that they are a smooth read by including strong transitions.
Transitional words and phrases ink paragraphs and sections together to showcase how what you wrote about before connects to what you are writing next, with words such as “similarly,” “however,” “by contrast,” and “therefore.”
Revisions and Proofreading
After writing the first draft of your essay, don’t get ready to send it to your professor just yet.
Make some time to make changes and revisions for content and clarity and to catch mechanical errors to get the final version of your essay as close to flawless as possible.
Express Your Voice
After securing all the facts that back up your argument, don’t forget to insert your personality in your essay.
You demonstrate your fluency by writing precise sentences that also utilize vocabulary that is appropriate to the topic but also reminds people that there is a human being behind the words and not just a robotically churned-out paper with some conversational questions and responses.
But make sure that you don’t get too caught up in expressing yourself that you use language that is explicit or overly casual, which makes it hard for the reader to either understand you or take you seriously.