What You Can Do to Boost Your College Essay Quality

How to Make Sure Your Essay Gets You the Best Possible Grade

Writing essays and other types of academic papers plays a huge role in education, no matter what discipline you study. Whether you major in English literature, history, linguistics, or any other discipline, you are bound to have to write an essay every now and then, and how well you do it determines your grades to a significant degree. Therefore, it is no wonder that making sure you improve your essay writing skills is a major concern for most students – and in this article, we will tell you what you can do or can start doing right now to improve the outcomes for all your paper writing efforts.

1.    Do Proofreading and Editing Separately

Most students do not see much difference between editing and proofreading, and for them both usually boil down to rereading their paper once before submitting it, trying to weed out some blatant mistakes and misspellings. In reality, these are two different procedures, and both deserve much more attention.

Proofreading (also called a correction) is the process of looking for grammar, spelling, and syntactical mistakes. When you proofread, you are primarily concerned with your text on a micro-level and do not care about the bigger picture. However, when you edit you make corrections to sentence structure, transitions between points, the internal logic of the paper, and its content in general. Professional writers do not mix the two, because it dilutes your attention and prevents you from doing a good job of either procedure. The usual practice is to do your editing first and then move on to proofreading. If you have a hard time fishing out your own mistakes, hire an editor and a corrector or proofreader from an online essay editing service: there are plenty of websites where you can buy help of this kind at a relatively cheap price.

2.    Research Your Sources before Using Them

Before you use a source of information in your essay, make sure you carefully study it and find out if it can be trusted. Be particularly wary of the data you get from Internet sites. Perhaps a traditionally published book on sale in a bookstore does not guarantee that its contents are truthful and up to date, but virtually anybody can publish anything on a website without any quality control whatsoever. When you use a source, do background checks and ask the following questions: who is the author? Who is the publisher? Can they have an agenda? Are they biased? Is the publication outdated? Is the information in the source corroborated by other sources?

3.    Pay Attention to Formatting and Bibliography

“Should I really waste my time and attention on these things? It always seemed to me that they are little more than formalities”. If you think something along these lines, you are sorely mistaken. Formatting plays an extremely important role in academic writing, and what grade you get is heavily dependent on how well you manage to follow the rules of your chosen (or assigned) formatting style. So, either study the style guide carefully and make sure you follow it to the letter or use the services of a company that helps students reorganize their writing to meet such requirements.

4.    Prepare an Outline before You Start Writing

Some students only write outlines if the assignment in question directly demands that they do it. Some go as far as do it after the fact or hire somebody from a writing service to prepare an outline for an already finished essay. Those who do it completely miss the point of outline, as it is something that is supposed to make your work on an essay easier and more organized. So do not turn writing it into a farce. Take some time to prepare it before you sit down to write your essay – it will help you make a better job on your assignment, as you are less likely to forget things or repeat something.

5.    Make Sure You Understand the Question and the Argument

You will be amazed how many students do not get high grades because they fail to read the assignment properly in the first place. They look over the task quickly, in a hurry to start writing, and miss some important point, only to discover it when they are halfway finished. Do not fall into this trap, as it not just wastes your time but also demoralizes you and leads to poorer quality of writing.

Of course, following these suggestions will not you into a master writer immediately. No matter what methods you apply and what tips you use, writing requires a great deal of practice to get better at. However, using these approaches can bring positive results relatively quickly – and it is exactly what you need when every grade for every essay matters.