Essay writing is something that students are required to do quite often. It is, therefore, a skill that has to be necessarily honed and sharpened on a constant basis.
However, when it comes to improving essay writing skills, many students may be in a quandary as to where they should start. And that’s understandable. There are a lot of different aspects of writing, and it can be easy to get overwhelmed.
In order to help you with that, in this post, we are going to be looking at five different ways for improving student’s essay writing skills. Let’s get started.
5 Efficient Ways to Improve Essay Writing Skills
1. Incorporating Grammar Checkers into the Writing Process
One of the foundations and key elements of good essays is perfect grammar. If a student does not have a sound understanding of grammar, they will make different types of mistakes and blunders throughout the content, which can be detrimental to the quality of their work.
In order to overcome this issue, one of the easiest solutions that students can try out is to use grammar checkers when writing their essays.
However, when picking a grammar checker for this purpose, it is important to look for one that can, apart from pointing out the issues, also provide the reason and logic behind them.
An example of this is shown in the image below:
Coming back to our point, the reason that using a grammar checker can be a good way to improve essay writing skills is that it allows the students to spot their mistakes while also learning about the reason why that particular error was pointed out.
Then, the students can fix the mistakes while also learning how to avoid them in the future.
2. Using Plagiarism Checkers for Making Essays Unique
Just as grammatical perfection is one of the cornerstones of a good essay, so too are uniqueness and originality. Plagiarism can totally wreck the quality and integrity of an essay, which is why it is absolutely necessary to avoid it at all costs.
Nowadays, there is so much material and literature available that one can plagiarize stuff even if there is no intention to do it. Innocent writers may also have to face the repercussions of plagiarism even if they don’t go around looking for content to steal.
But, hopeless as the situation may sound, there is an easy solution for it. And that is to use a plagiarism checker every time you happen to finish writing an essay.
And here is where a plagiarism checker can come in handy for improving students’ essay writing skills.
Essentially, if a student finds that some text in their essay is plagiarized, and it is such that it cannot be removed or edited, then they can simply find out the exact source from the plagiarism checker. Then, after finding out the source, they can take the necessary steps to accredit it, thus saving themselves from the consequences and penalties of plagiarism.
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3. Using Paraphrasing Tools
Right at the outset, we should clarify that mentioning this point here is not for the purpose of advocating the unethical use of paraphrasing tools; which is something they are notorious for.
Rather, we are mentioning this point in the context of the ethical and beneficial purposes that paraphrasing tools can help students with.
There can be more, but for the moment, there are two main purposes for which a paraphrasing tool can be ethically used:
- Removing plagiarism
- Improving clarity and quality of text
Let’s look at both one by one.
First of all, a paraphrasing tool can help with making the content unique. This does not refer to, in any capacity, taking someone’s else content and rewording it using a paraphraser.
Rather, this simply means that if some plagiarism appears in a certain part of the essay, it can be removed by rewriting that specific portion using a paraphraser.
Moving on, another benefit of using a paraphrasing tool is that it can help students make their content clearer and more engaging.
Of course, once again, this does not mean that students should just write lousy essays and then depend on a paraphraser to fix them. Instead, the paraphrasing tools can be used in an educative capacity.
Students can enter their content in the tool and look at the various changes that it makes.
Then, the students can go through their essays and look for other places where those sorts of changes can prove to be helpful to the overall quality.
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4. Using Readability Checking Tools
Another aspect that students have to be careful about when writing essays is readability. Although there is some leeway for high readability in academic content, it should still be kept at a low level.
There are different types of factors that can decide whether the essay is difficult to read or otherwise.
For example, an essay that contains a lot of passive voice will be more difficult to read as compared to an essay that is composed majorly of sentences in active voice.
Similarly, an essay with a lot of segmentation will be easier to peruse as compared to an essay that’s just one block of text.
In order to find and fix these types of issues, students can use readability-checking tools. Plus, apart from fixing the issues, students can also get a thorough idea about them. This will help them in avoiding the issues in the future.
Before wrapping up this point, here are some of the common readability issues that students can find in their work:
- Too much passive voice
- Too many adverbs
- Long and convoluted sentences
- Absence or shortage of heading and sub-headings
- Difficult words
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5. Reading Content Written by Experts and Professionals
This is also a very effective way to improve student writing skills.
Whenever you have some free time that you want to spend constructively, you should open up an essay, report or a research paper that is written by an industry professional or an expert in the field.
Reading professionally written content can help you realize the things that you’re doing wrong in your essays. You can compare your work to the work of a professional, and this will help you realize the aspects that you’re currently lacking.
Conclusion
If you are a student and you’re trying to improve your essay writing skills, there are plenty of different ways that you can get around it. In this post, we looked at five of them.
In essence, if we wanted to rate the tips mentioned above with regards to their priority and importance, we would say that you should begin with reading professionally written content and using grammar-checking tools.
Although the rest of the steps are important as well, you can start off with these two if you want to begin a little lightly.
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