Read the article to improve your writing skills with a proper planning, spending less time on tasks, developing your personal style and correcting mistakes.
How to improve your writing skills in 5 steps
If you’re a student, it means you face a lot of writing tasks to do. Great texts don’t appear just because you want them to be such. You should learn and develop the writing skills. You should know how to do the research and compile a piece of writing out of the results of the research and your personal opinion about the topic of the paper. In this article, we’ll give you the five tips on how you can improve your writing skills. Scroll down to read all of them or pick up only the ones that are interesting for you.
Plan your writing
How do most of the students perform their writing tasks? They take the topic and just start writing something without any planning. What happens at the end of such approach? They either fail to finish their task on time or they have difficulties with writing generally. Planning your work over an essay or a term paper will help you eliminate unnecessary steps and let you finish writing earlier. As experts from essay for ever.com state, planning takes about ten to fifteen minutes and lets you save over 3 hours of your time that you would have to spend on doing the task if you didn’t plan it.
Take a calendar and write down what you will write on every day or every week depending on the type of paper and the deadline. You can use colorful pencils for that. Don’t forget to give yourself a little rest to let your motivation start at a high level for a long time. Divide the whole process of creating a new paper into tiny steps that you will cross out in the calendar after you finish them. You will see that you have done so much work and you won’t wonder what you have spent all your time on.
Spend less time
Sounds a bit controversial, right? And yes, you should spend less time on writing essays, term papers, and even dissertations. How’s that possible? If you decide that you will spend five hours on writing an introduction for your new essay, you will be doing this task during five hours. But if you set only one hour to do the same task, you will easily cope with it within this period of time. Just focus on the time limit and that you have a very little time to do the task. You will be greatly surprised that fast speed is applicable when writing a text.
If you are motivated, you can do a big piece of work in a short period of time. Find anything that can motivate you even if it’s a piece of chocolate bar that you will eat after you write down the last line. So you need to focus on the task, raise your speed to the maximum and spend very little time on writing. You will fail if you try to do this for more than one hour as the resources of your mind and body are limited. It’s great to spend from ten to fifty minutes on high-speed tasks.
Have your style
Never try to imitate anyone. Try to find your style of writing. If you’re writing an essay, write the words and the phrases as if you were talking to a friend. If you’re writing a term paper, imagine yourself talking to your professor and so on. If you use your natural language, you will easily develop your personal style and the readers will easily recognize it in your future texts even without looking at the name of the author of the story.
If you feel lost and you want to find something particular for all of your works, think of what can make readers think that it’s really your style and not the imitation of someone else. IF you use general phrases that everyone does, try to use synonyms at first. Just change half of the words in the text to the synonyms. Another variant is paraphrasing sentences using another tense or even voice. Play with grammar and you will definitely find something that will attract you the most.
Don’t use Wikipedia
The worst thing that you can do is using Wikipedia as your primary source for any type of papers. You cannot use it as it’s not the original source. It’s a compilation of facts that was created by an average internet user. However, you can use the sources that were used for creating Wikipedia articles. Just click the links and view the original pages of the sites or find the books in the library.
Don’t cite any phrases from Wikipedia, it will be treated as using unreliable sources of information and you will get a low grade for this. Imagine that you have written an essay and someone will cite you in their papers instead of using the books, journals and other things that you have used for preparing the text. You should find the very original document that has been qualified as reliable and it was published officially.
Proofread the text
The most thrilling thing is to say that most of the students never proofread their papers. And this sad fact leads to low grades and other sad results. If you want to become a talented writer and you want the whole world to know your name, you have to proofread every symbol of your text. If you want to publish your dissertation in a journal, it can be rejected because of grammar and spelling errors. And correcting these errors takes a few hours while waiting for another try to get your paper printed can take a few years.
Proofreading means reading your text silently and aloud. Read carefully and make pauses to use the right punctuation. If you feel that some phrases or sentences are difficult to read, you should paraphrase them. If you can’t remember the right spelling of the word, use online or offline spell checkers for that. Remember that proofreading takes a few hours, so don’t be lazy to make yourself look for mistakes in your own text.
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