Academic papers are a staple for college studies. Besides helping improve your critical thinking skills, academic-level writing helps improve your ability to report on various topics and make academic arguments.
Many college students, however, struggle with writing a college paper with most settling for the bare minimum of completing and submitting a paper. This article will offer writing tips for college to help you overcome mediocre papers, ensuring fast completion of your papers without compromising on quality.
What is college writing?
College writing refers to academic writing intended to analyse, prove and argue a point based on evidence. Unlike high school writing tasks, college tasks are meant to familiarize a student with the body of knowledge in a topic by requiring a learner to make a coherent argument while using various sources as evidence.
As such, college papers are analytical and longer than their high school counterparts.
Tips for writing papers in college
Your approach to college writing greatly determines the quality of your papers. some of the tips that we recommend for outstanding college papers are:
1. Start early
When writing an essay, start early to have ample time to perform quality research and edit your paper thoroughly. Ideally, develop a schedule for writing your essay and set your daily targets to ensure gradual progression in your writing process.
Also, chunk your writing into phases to overcome procrastination that stems from a fear of the sheer amount of work associated with writing your essay.
2. Develop an outline
An outline is a great resource that helps you gauge the completeness of research and the flow of arguments in a paper for college. Owing to the vast number of arguments within your paper, you should develop an outline to organize your claims into a quality argument.
The outline usually guides you in writing your essay while avoiding conflicting ideas that could side-track you to other ideas.
3. Consult your tutor
Your tutor is a great guide for various phases of your writing. The tutor can help your gauge the quality of your selected topic, helping you to make various adjustments before you start to write your paper.
After developing an outline, consult your tutor for guidance as they can highlight ideas that require further research and determine how well your topic meets its purpose.
4. Take breaks
Like all muscles, the brain wears out after long durations of exercise. As such, you cannot manage to focus on an essay over long durations. Your attention span tends to reduce after limited periods of activity, impairing your capacity to work on a paper objectively.
Ideally, take breaks in your writing session to refocus your attention, ensuring maximum productivity. you may opt to employ the Pomodoro technique and use incremental rewards to associate the completion of various goals with positive stimuli.
5. Keep it simple
Often, students feel the pressure of making each essay their magnum opus. As such, they set unrealistic ideals for their paper, and apply tons of technical jargon to achieve the standards of scientific publications.
This approach exposes on to extreme pressure, limiting your capacity to work on your paper. Ideally, write your paper in a clear, simple manner that’s easy for any person to read. Also, limit the use of jargon to topic-related terminologies to avoid ambiguity, which could compromise your final score.
6. Keep track of your sources
College-level writing is heavily dependent on sources to support various arguments within your paper. Unfortunately, the failure to credit a source within your work may result in plagiarism.
For this, we recommend that you keep a meticulous list of all sources used in your argument, making it easy to prepare a complete bibliography section.
7. Get editing help
Editing is a crucial stage for writing in college. However, time is rarely a luxury afforded to many college students. Editing help may come in handy for writing your paper.
This assistance allows you to manage your paper in time and overcome time limitations that could compromise quality editing.
8. Practice
Practice makes perfect. If you are looking to improve your essay writing skills, read a vast number of academic papers and also write multiple papers.
Through practice, you can learn how to head a college paper, and various referencing styles and broaden your perspective on various topics.
