A school is considered to be the place where we acquire proper habits that help us during the whole our life. However, these habits are not always good especially when we are talking about writing. The matter is that writing is a rather special ability that has been common to each of us, however, not everyone is capable of telling that writing is really something they can do perfectly.
Being a school kid, we discover only some basic principles of efficient writing such as the mechanical process of writing, basic abilities to present the ideas on paper, and key ideas for an understanding of style. In college, we start to understand that this knowledge is not enough as to write flawlessly, you need to know more than just the structure of the essay and the ways to use resources in your writing.
In this article, we are going to discuss essay writing habits that we acquire in school but that have nothing in common with high-quality writing. Moreover, we will give you several recommendations on how to turn these ineffective habits into the effective ones.
Contents
Never paying attention to the subject of the essay
The first most common writing habit that may spoil your writing is that most of the schoolchildren never analyse the subject of the essay. They just look it through and write what they want to tell not what the essay requires. Frequently, in school, this is enough as the teachers are not concerned with teaching the kids to dig deeper into the theme, but it will never be enough for the college. You need to understand what exactly you need to pay your attention to in the essay, what points to highlight, and even what bulk of language to use, as the subject of the essay may state even that. Thus, change your attitude to the subjects and stop considering them as only the basic guidelines for your thoughts. In fact, this is a roadmap that you need to develop and your main guidelines for creating an effective paper.
Usage of artificial language
Many school kids never think of the language they use in the essay. They just try to sound smart and well-educated, thus they use the most unexpected words and word combinations found in a thesaurus. However, artificial language always kills the beauty of the essay and your own personality that affects the style and general atmosphere of the paper. In a college, you should always avoid this approach to writing, and even if you want to sound smarter, you just need to find proper words that integrate naturally into text.
Lack of style
Colleges and universities pay a huge attention to the style of your essays. Sometimes, a certain writing style is indicated as the requirement which means that you need to stick to it if you want to get a better grade. However, if there are no requirements concerning the style, you still need to define the style for your paper and stick to it. It will help you write a better paper and get a better grade.
Keeping the structure
Although even the school teachers insist on keeping the structure of the paper, many pupils just ignore this point. They do not think about the structure, they want just to write something good enough to get B. However, in college, this may be one of the biggest mistakes that will lead to the situation when the paper is not accepted by the professor. So remember the golden rule of a good paper, it should consist of the main body, introductory part, and the conclusion.
Writing in long paragraphs
Another common habit that all the students need to get rid when they come to the college is writing in long and twisted paragraphs. Always remember that each single paragraph should contain only one idea, and it is better not to mix the evidence, facts, and arguments in one single paragraph. Always divide a long paper into many small paragraphs so that your readers could easily catch the idea that you carry.
Ignoring punctuation
Many school kids do remember that they need to be attentive to the grammar, but not all of them are ready to be attentive to the punctuation as well. Frequently, the school teachers allow making punctuation mistakes and even do not pay attention to them. However, in college every single comma is important, and if you miss the comma, you will definitely get a worse grade.
Forgetting to proofread
In school, everyone talks about the importance of editing the paper, but almost no one pays attention to the proofreading which is actually second important step after writing. While proofreading, you pay attention to such details as the logic of your paper, the ideas that you bring into life, and the coherence of the facts that you use in the paper.
These 7 habits are really important to know as getting rid of them is vital to get better grades. If you are still in school, you have some time to improve your writing step by step, but if you are already a college student, you need to pay more efforts to get rid of them in the soonest time possible.
