Improving your essay skills in five steps

Tips for gaining essay skills

All through your academic career, probably starting in school and most likely, later too, you will be required to write a lot of essays. College is definitely a huge writing training. But, speaking of training, what if you feel writing essays is not your thing? Can you somehow get better at it? Can anyone teach you how to improve your essay skills?
The good news is, you are probably able to acquire essay writing skills by yourself. Writing training is something anyone can try. Here we provide you with some tips to improve your essay skills and make you feel much comfortable next time a teacher asks for an essay writing task. Take them step by step!

Step 1: organization

When writing an essay, most students will just sit in front of the blank page and say “Ok, now what?”. This makes them very difficult to move on with their writing. If you tend to experience this kind of writer’s block often, maybe it is because of your lack of organization. In any assignment writing a proper organization is a must. So always use titles, subtitles, an index and all the other textual elements that provide your essays with a very desirable professional look.

Step 2: research

When you are researching for an essay, do not constraint yourself to one or two authors. Go to the library and investigate the topic you have decided to write about. Look up for articles in magazines, interview an expert on the subject, read a couple of articles in dictionaries and encyclopedias before actually starting to write.

Step 3: proper quoting

A basic essay skill is referencing an essay in an appropriate way. The essay writer must copy literally every single quote, always mentioning the author, their work, the publisher and the year, as well as the page where they took the quote from. Quotation marks are mandatory, otherwise you could be accused of plagiarism.

Step 4: word count

How exactly is your essay word count supposed to be? It is up to the examiner to say. If you have the chance to ask them, find out whether the extension is an estimate one or if it should be exact. If the essay is getting published somewhere, you must follow directions to avoid blank spaces or valuable information being erased. Always maintain the variation in word amounts to a minimum.

Step 5: good grammar and spelling

If you feel your essay skills are not great, maybe you need to improve your grammar and spelling. Practice writing down those words you always misspell. Look up the words in a dictionary every time you are uncertain on how to write the, This may take a while, but a proper spelling will certainly show in the essay’s final mark.

Remember that writing is a habit one must acquire, such as studying. If you pay attention to the given steps and practice them every single time you are requested to write an essay, you will eventually learn to write much better. And then it is just a matter of time before you are writing the best essay you’ve never imagined.

Tags: essay skills, essay tips, Essay Writing