Learning to write essays can be one of the greatest skills of your educational journey. Regardless, the art of essay writing is not just about following certain principles but also about avoiding certain mistakes. Despite being very basic, many writers commit these mistakes and don’t get much engagement for their essays. If you are looking to provide the best essay writing services, you should definitely keep in mind these common mistakes and avoid them as much as possible to curate quality content. Here are 7 things you can take care of to write a good essay.
Pointers to keep in mind while writing an essay
Ignoring the Thesis Statement
The first mistake that people often make is ambiguity in stating your opinion as a thesis statement. The point of writing an essay is to defend a thesis by creating an argument. Coming up with a strong thesis statement where you express the main idea of your entire text is very essential.
The thesis statement is the centre around which the rest of your essay revolves. The essay should involve your analysis based on some credible research instead of simply restating from the book. Put an opinion based and specific thesis statement at the end of introduction so that it serves as a connection with the body of the essay.
Redundancy of Ideas
Writers usually get trapped in redundancy by repeating the same idea throughout the essay many times. Not just the idea, the repetitive use of various phrases and sentences is seen. Often students just keep on rephrasing the same idea of thesis again and again.
Keep in mind that you should not go off the tangent and avoid rambling on. You may want to write down every idea you come across but always focus on the prompt that you are writing on. Making your content superfluous and confusing by writing too many ideas is not advisable. You should refrain yourself from getting off the point and putting too much information and too many facts, making your main thesis argument confusing. https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.493.0_en.html#goog_470168801
Also another common mistake is to just rephrase the introduction as your conclusion. Instead write about the gist of your findings, questions arising from the research and explore the implications of those points in your conclusion.
Resorting to Plagiarism
It goes without saying that some students are very careless about their essays while using other people’s writing. Always remember that you can reuse another person’s text in your content only by citing it and giving the original author a proper credit.
Plagiarism is defined as “the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.” If you are not careful enough and commit it even by mistake or oversight, you won’t be able to get away with it as colleges and universities consider it as a serious offense and have strict policies against it. If you are willing to offer the best essay writing services, you can employ several tools to check for plagiarised content. Also for professionals, it’s easy to distinguish between something a student wrote and content taken from another source, be it directly taking the words from a source without giving credit or rewording any section of an article. You can use some of the best plagiarism checker tools to check the plagiarism in the content.
Make sure that your essay contains your own thesis, analysis and ideas based on credible research from academic authorities with proper citations.
Making Assumptions
Often students make assumptions over completely subjective theories and provide it as over dramatic facts. Overdramatizing a topic gives off the impression of an elementary writer rather than a skilled essayist. Try to express the facts as they are, instead of misunderstanding and making assumptions.
Even though making assumptions that your audience knows the point may seem like the easy way, it isn’t wise to jump to conclusions and avoid clarifying the concept. You can try saying “many people believe that” or “It is considered by notable sources” when introducing a fact that might be common knowledge.
Inducing Colloquialism
Avoid informal or casual words while writing an academic essay. Abbreviations such as won’t, don’t, etc. or expressions like ‘so on’, ‘on the other hand’ ‘so forth’ ‘it goes without saying’ should be avoided. Cliches reflect your incapability to give words to your thoughts and seem like a weak attempt to hide your own confusions. Learn to avoid stereotypes.
Seeping everyday talk into your scholarly writing is a very bad thing to do. Avoid using Colloquial language when writing an essay. All you have to do is to reword the sentences in an elegant and professional manner to make your writing formal and serious.
Also, at all costs, stay clear of using slang. There are many sophisticated and eloquent diction available in all the languages that you can use in place of such words. You can take help from some of the best essay writing services to get a clear picture of what words you should avoid. You can easily take your essay to the next level by using scholarly words instead of hurting your writing skills as a slang does.
Not Proofreading or Revising
It is human nature to make mistakes and even writing is not safe from our mistakes. You cannot avoid mistakes but can eliminate them by reading your essay many times and correcting as many as possible. Proofreading is of great importance as you check your own content while considering different aspects at different times. Ask a friend or colleague to look out for errors and eliminate as many as possible.
Spend one fifth of the total time in proofreading and removing grammatical and spelling errors. The mistakes often corrected are- spellings, spaces, capital letters, punctuation marks, grammar etc. You should also remove all Irrelevant keywords or phrases present in the essay, thus making it more concise and credible.
Not Having Credible Resources
Frankly speaking, we all go to the internet in search of information and resources while doing our research for an essay. It is easy to just type in the topic and then look at dozens of resources. But more often than not these resources are not credible. While writing a quality essay, you must make sure to use sources from academic experts.
Using credible sources improves the essay, making it of higher quality and helps you come up with an original analysis. Also make sure to give citations of these resources in a proper bibliographic format.In the age of the Internet, it’s easy to type in a keyword and find dozens of articles on it.
Bottom Line
Avoiding the above mistakes will help you write a flawless essay, while also helping you achieve higher quality and confidence in your writing skills. You should also refer to standard academic essays available on the internet, take help from vocabulary guides or consult some of the best essay writing services. Keeping a few factors in mind, you can write a high quality flawless essay.
This article was written by Susan Barlow and first appeared on businesswritingblog.com