As a student, writing a good essay can make the difference between getting a good grade on a course or not. A good essay can create a good impression on your teachers and peers and bring you into a beneficial spotlight for your time in school or college.
If you are looking to improve the level of your essay writing, you’re at the right place. In this post, we’re going to look at some tips that you can follow to master the art of essay writing.
Let’s get started right away.
1. Learn to Conduct Research the Proper Way
If you conduct research properly for your essay, it can make all the difference in the end quality. The sources where you conduct your research, the time when you do it, and the way you perform it all have to be correct and proper.
Here are some tips and pointers to keep in mind regarding all of those.
Choosing the right sources
As for the sources where you conduct your research, they have to be credible and reliable. They should have a trustworthy image in academia so that they make your arguments and points in the essay look authoritative. When choosing sources for your research, you should first check with your institute/instructor to see if there are any that are expressly prohibited or encouraged.
Oftentimes, institutes can prohibit their students from conducting research using a certain source. Wikipedia is a good example of this. Many schools and colleges tell their students that information from Wikipedia cannot be reliably used in assignments and essays.
Once you confirm whether or not there are any injunctions about research provided to you, you can pick a few reliable sources such as:
- Research portals like Google Scholar and ResearchGate
- Journals like Springer
- Reliable websites such as Forbes
And so on.
The criteria for selecting research sources are popularity and credibility.
Performing research the right way
Once you find your sources and everything, the next thing is to perform the research itself. The way you do that also shapes the quality of your essay.
To make it easy for you to understand, we’re going to mention them here in the form of actionable tips.
- Don’t rely on a single document or research paper for garnering information. Doing so can be risky. If there is something unreliable about that one research material and you only use that one, it can lead to your entire essay becoming unreliable.Also, by reading different materials, you can get a broad idea of the topic that you want to write on, and you are less likely to become unfairly biased.
- When taking information from a source, don’t copy the same words and terms that they’ve used. This can lead you to commit plagiarism. Our own approach to doing research is to understand the core concept being conveyed by the material at hand and then note it down in our own words. Afterward, it is easy to elaborate on those without worrying about copying anyone verbatim.
Choosing the right time for research
The timing of your research is also an important factor. Ideally, you should conduct the research for your essay a couple of days before writing it. In other words, you should do your research and then compile all the information you want. After some time, you can write your essay based on that information.
The benefit of doing this is simple. You are able to forget the exact style and words of the source material. This lets you be more original and creative when you have to write the essay yourself.
2. Write in a Formal and Authoritative Tone
Essays are academic write-ups. As such, they have to be written using the right formal tone. On top of being formal, the tone of your essay should also be authoritative. It should be direct and factual (especially when you’re writing a descriptive or narrative essay).
To make the tone formal, here are some things that you can do:
- Avoid using slang in the essay. The slightest incorporation of slang in the essay can wreck its formal look. By slang, we mean using words like “Gotta,” “Dope,” or other similar street-style lingo.
- Avoid using contractions. Grammatical contractions aren’t exactly at the same level as slang, but they make the text look conversational and casual. For example, saying “I have conducted the research in so-and-so way” is more essay-like than saying “I’ve conducted the research in so-and-so way.”
- Avoid writing in the second person. While there are some write-ups that have to contain the use of “you” and “your,” an essay is not one of them. If you start addressing the reader directly in your essay, it would be very unsuitable in terms of tone.
The tips above are for making the tone formal. Now, let’s look at some tips to make the tone authoritative.
- Be definitive and direct in your statements. Using the words “perhaps” and “probably” will make the essay look doubtful and weak. You have to avoid using words like these. Instead, your words should show your confidence in your own statements.
- Adding stats and figures in the essay can also help in setting the tone to be more authoritative. ww wh While figures and stats themselves don’t make a difference in the tone, they help in making the peripheral text sound more reliable. By addressing the stats, facts, and figures, you are able to write in a definitive and straight manner.
Considering all the different things that you have to do to adjust the tone of your essay, it can be said that it is not an easy task. You can take care of one thing, and then another issue can pop up.
We personally have found that using an online paraphrasing tool can be beneficial for this purpose. And we don’t mean just any paraphrasing tool; rather, we mean a tool that provides a feature, especially for making the given text look more academic.
To give you a recommendation and an example, here is an online tool that provides this feature. Its name is Paraphrase-Online, and as you can see in the screenshot below, it makes the text look more formal and academic when the specific mode is used:
3. Be Sure to Check Your Essay and Fix All Errors
This is a commonly-heard but helpful tip that we can give you for writing good essays. You can put a lot of effort into researching and writing the text out, but if you don’t proofread it later on, there are chances of a few errors ruining the whole quality.
What exactly do you have to do when checking your essay? You have to look for the following issues:
- Grammar and spelling errors. These are probably the most common mistakes that are made when writing an essay. You can find them easily by proofreading the text a couple of times. Using a grammar checker is also a good idea to make sure no error remains.
- Formatting issues. Formatting, in this context, basically refers to the way the text is written and arranged. This matters more when you’re writing and submitting the essay digitally. You have to ensure that the formatting of the text (such as the size and color of the font) remains consistent throughout the essay and that it adheres to the guidelines you’re provided.
- Organization and content structuring. When you’re writing a long essay, you often have to break it down into headings and sub-headings. Once you’re done, you should check the organization and content structuring to make sure that all the headings and their respective sub-headings are correctly placed.
Conclusion
Writing good essays is easy. If you know what you’re doing, you don’t even have to work very hard. You just have to work smart. Conducting research the right way, writing with the correct tone, and proofreading at the end are three of the most important tips to follow for mastering the art of essay writing. We hope you enjoyed reading, and we hope this post helped you realize how to improve your writing skills.
