5 Essay Writing Tips for Students in 2022
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Are you finding it hard to come up with an outstanding essay? Don’t worry, it happens.
When writing an essay, there are several aspects and factors that you have to keep in mind. You have to take care of keeping the essay organized and easy to read. Similarly, you have to make sure that the text is totally unique.
In this post, we’re going to help you get an idea about these various aspects by mentioning some simple tips. By keeping these tips in mind, you will be able to come up with unique, credible and outstanding essays.
Let’s get started.
5 Essay Writing Tips for Students in 2022
1. Spread Out Your
Research
The first and most basic step that you have to take when writing an essay is to do research. However, for a lot of students, the idea of research may be to just look at some material written on a credible source and then re-write it in their own words. This is something you have to avoid.
When doing research for writing your essay, you should spread it out on multiple sources. In other words, you should not just open up a single source and then re-write everything from there.
There are essentially two benefits of doing this:
By spreading and diversifying your research, you can reduce and even eliminate the chances of accidentally copying a source. In other words, if you use a single source (such as a journal or a research paper) for doing your research, then you could unknowingly start using their words and phrases. This could eventually lead to plagiarism.
Similarly, by diversifying your research, you will be able to make your essay interesting and informative. You will be able to combine the information from your research and come up with a comprehensive essay.
1. Simplify Your
Writing Using a Paraphrasing Tool
Before starting on this point, we should clarify what we mean here by using a paraphrasing tool.
In the academic world, paraphrasing tools are generally seen as…negative. Paraphrasers are known to some people as some sort of unethical tools that are only used by unscrupulous writers for mechanically churning out content.
And while that is true to some extent, there are several neat and clean uses for these tools as well…which is what we’re going to be discussing right now.
So, back to the point at hand.
In academic writing, there is some leeway for using complicated words and terms. Since the content is ‘academic’ in nature, the complex words and sentences don’t look too out of place. However, despite this, it is better to keep the essay simple and easy to understand.
And that is where paraphrasing tools can help us.
If you find that a particular piece of text in your essay is too difficult to read, you can just chuck it inside a paraphraser and have it rewritten. We don’t advocate, in any capacity, to use a paraphrasing tool on someone else’s content. Rather, you can just use it on your own. This way, there won’t be anything unethical about it.
Here, check out the screenshot below. It’s a nonsensical sentence, but see how the tool simplifies it.
Another point to keep in mind here is that not all paraphrasing tools are capable of making the text simpler to read. Some have a haphazard working, and they can just make the entered content more complex than what it previously was. So, when selecting a tool for this purpose, you should do a couple of test runs to get an idea about the functionality.
2. Keep Your Essay
Organized
It’s not very pleasant nor very easy for someone to go through an essay that’s just one giant wall of text. Even if the material itself is interesting and well-written, it will look terrible if there is no proper organization in it.
When writing an essay, you should not write a paragraph with more than five lines. After five lines, you should break the paragraph and get started on a new one. Similarly, you should try and add as many sub-headings as you can.
Adding sub-headings and keeping the paragraphs short will help the reader easily go through the essay.
2. Find and Remove
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is about the worst thing that can plague your essay.
There are many harms and consequences of plagiarism. If done deliberately, it can wreck your credibility, lower your grade or worse, get you expelled.
The thing about plagiarism is that even if you don’t intend to do it, you can still commit it unintentionally. There is a lot of material available online, and it’s not difficult for one to get an accidental match in their content.
Accidental or unintentional plagiarism does not draw as many consequences as deliberate plagiarism (since the former is usually in a very small percentage), but it still needs to be detected and removed.
For detecting plagiarism in your work, you can simply use a plagiarism checker online. There are many such tools available that you can use. Quite a few of them are free to access and they provide accurate results as well.
After you detect plagiarism in your essay, you can take the necessary steps to remove it. There are quite a few things you can do here. You can:
Remove the plagiarized part altogether
Put it in quotes
Cite the source
Paraphrase or rewrite it to make it unique
2. Don’t Miss Out on
Proofreading and Editing the Essay
After you are done writing your essay, you should dedicate a session to proofreading it. There can be many mistakes and typos that you can find during the proofreading phase.
One useful tip that you can keep in mind about proofreading your essay is not to do it instantly after writing it. In other words, you should do the proofreading after some hours of writing the essay.
The benefit of waiting for some time before proofreading is that you somewhat forget what you had written. If you instantly check the essay after writing it, you can simply flit over the content without properly taking it in since it will all be present in your short-term memory.
Conclusion
So there you have it.
When coming up with an essay, your focus should not be on just writing the text out. Rather, you should aim to make it easy for your reader to go through. For this, you should keep your writing simple and give it proper organization.
Other than this, you should also try your best to find and remove any sort of plagiarism or duplication from the essay. You should do this even if you had no intention to deliberately commit it in the first place.
