How To Develop Your Essay-Writing Skills

Do your teachers always mark your essays with red ink? Are you curious to learn how to express yourself clearly and effectively? If so, there are several steps you can take to improve your essay-writing skills. First, understand how to write a well-organized essay and improve your grammar. Since academic essays are complicated, learn about formal, scholarly writing. Finally, read as much as possible; Seeing how other writers use the language can improve your writing.

How to start essay writing?

Reading

To start writing, you must first read. Read the essay question carefully and highlight the keywords and parts of the question. Then, read your lecture notes and read further on the topic using the reading list and other resources.

While reading, make lots of notes and list all the sources you have used. You will need this to write a comprehensive bibliography at the end. It is essential to be able to reference and use citations. Copying and using other people's words in your essays is a severe offense at university and has serious consequences. You can learn how to reference and use citations in our article on Reference.

Planning

This part is just as important as the actual writing, so ensure you take advantage of this step. Use essay questions to guide you and help keep you focused. Questions can help provide the overall structure for your essay. Your reading and notes will also help you decide on a plan, don't worry if you need to change the order or structure as you move forward; It's easier to adapt a plan than to rewrite an entire essay.

During this planning phase, you can organize your thoughts into different sections and begin to insert some details and context into paragraphs. Then, once you're happy that your plan is clearly and cohesively organized (the ideas and paragraphs tie together) and that the essay covers each part of the question, you're ready to start writing.

Writing

If you've followed this advice, it will be easier to start writing now because you have a solid plan. When writing, make sure your arguments are supported by evidence and that you use words or ideas from a different source each time. Every university, and sometimes every department, has its reference style, so make sure you follow the guidelines.

To avoid potentially using someone else's words or ideas, you need to be able to summarize and explain. Paraphrasing is to express in your own words the meaning of something you read during your research. This is a crucial academic writing skill that all university students need to learn – it's not just international students. Each university has its academic skills and English language support services, so please use them.

Reviewing

This is the last part of the essay writing process and should not be missed or shortened. You should re-read your essay and check the following:

• Each part of the essay question has been answered.
• The introduction has a thesis statement and a clear essay structure.
• Each paragraph has only one topic.
• Each paragraph should have a topic sentence.
• Relevant and strong evidence.

The importance of essay writing for students

Yes, it's that simple - essays are essential to professors and students, and there's more than one reason for that. They can sharpen your writing skills, creative thinking, and organization of ideas. Here, we've listed the most obvious ones. Of course, you can continue this list for fun and train your creativity.

Essay writing strengthens creativity

Even the most boring topics leave you wondering how to cover them. You seek information, assess it, combine it, analyze it, summarize and present it creatively. Whereas years ago, academic essay writing was more dry and passive (with lots of passive voice sentences throughout the document), now creativity plays the most important role. First, students should remember the structure and general rules of essay writing. Creativity comes in many forms, and essay writing helps to consolidate most of them.

Writing essays prepares you for more complex tasks.

When in college and later maybe in university, you need to write research papers, term papers, and case studies; when you go to a thesis paper or dissertation, you remember when you need to write an essay. It was so easy if needed. Each essay assignment prepares you for the moment you need to write an extended paper with a complex structure, dozens of sources, and annotated bibliography.