Academic writing can be a challenge for a lot of students. They often fail to recognize their assignment requirements and end up complicating their work. As a result, their hard work is wasted and they end up with low grades.
Hence, it is essential to understand the techniques that can help you elevate your academic essays. These tips can improve your academic writing and help you become a professional!
So, without any further delays, let’s get started!
Grasp the topic
It is important to understand your assignment before you start writing it. Many students and researchers often jump to the writing part without spending enough time to plan.
Additionally, it goes without saying that you shouldn’t put your essays for the last minute. It will steal your thinking time and you will end up writing low-value content.
1 Comprehend the question
First off, understand what you have to write. You should spend enough time researching your topic and gluing useful information to your head. But, not everyone is good at retaining loads of information. Hence, we recommend trying these few techniques:
- Highlight key information: highlight important information by digital markers or pointers.
Often, statistics and numbers are ignored in a text, resulting in an incomplete content.
- Literature review: Read academic papers, article, and journals related to your research topic. Then, make an informed decision about your content list.
2. Understand the correct format
Secondly, be aware of the right format for your academic document. Some journals accept documents in IEEE format, while others may prefer Harvard style.
To understand the correct format:
- Ask your academic councilor: Take help from your professor, project supervisor, or instructor about where you have to publish your essay.
- Take help from your institution: Read through your university’s guidelines to determine the correct format. Or, ask a senior to help you.
Structure your paper
This is often the best and most ignored technique. Structuring your paper can give a clear roadmap for your readers to understand your content.
It will also help you to keep track of your talking points and stay relevant to your main topic.
1. Develop a clear thesis statement
Thesis statement is what your research paper is all about. In academic writing, students often develop a habit of writing without thinking. This makes them write irrelevant to the topic and lowers their scores.
Instead, try to define a clear thesis statement that let’s your readers know what you are writing about. A thesis statement cuts a clear picture about your position on the topic, and what your readers can expect from your document.
2. Develop a ToC
Table of contents (aka ToC) are set before the start of your main content. It acts as a guiding light for the readers and aids their understanding of your content.
Usually, examiners give good marks to students who have applied a ToC in their document. This is because the organization of the content makes their job a lot easier, and the examiners are impressed with the student’s attention-to-detail.
Write professionally
Always remind yourself the purpose of your writing and your audience. When you write academically, you are writing as a professional mostly addressing audience who are senior to you.
You are not writing to your friend, colleague, or a family member, so don’t be casual about it.
Be mindful of using the correct style for your writing and always write formally.
A. Avoid first person
Students may often write in a first person narrative and wonder why they haven’t received the grades they expected.
In academic writing, you should always write in a third-person narrative. We will explain from an example. “I think it’s difficult to determine the exact position of stars” – “It’s difficult to determine the exact position of stars”.
Latter is in first person and must be avoided, while the later example is the correct way to write academically.
The reason being that in academic writing, there is no margin of being doubtful. You have to write as you are the “all-knowing”.
In academics, you have to be determinate in your words and you can’t leave any space for doubt – hence, the use of third person narrative.
Avoid contractions and slang
Academic writing must never have any contractions or slang words. For instance, never use ‘can’t’, ‘won’t’, ‘e.g.’, or ‘a.s.a.p.’ and always write complete words.
Never use slang, which includes idiomatic expressions like, ‘Hold your horses’ or ‘it’s not rocket science’, and so on.
Additionally, you should also avoid unspecific determinate words. Always look to objectively define your meaning with words; in place of writing the word ‘huge’, write ‘5 meters tall’.
While these might feel insignificant changes to your writing, they can definitely help improve your grades.
Improve Clarity
An academic essay is not impactful if it isn’t written with clarity. Try the following techniques if you want to write with a professional touch.
- Understand the citation format
In-text citation is a way to reference someone’s work in your own writing. In an academic essay, it is important to use the right format of citations and referencing.
The students might forget about making citations, or they might make improper citations, making them loose marks.
An example of a proper citation would be (John & Doe, 2024, pp. 58-90).
The given example is an APA-7 in-text citation format. Here, John and Doe are the surnames of the two authors. The publication year is separated by a comma, and ‘pp’ indicates the page range from where we are citing the work.
Similarly, there are many other citation styles available and you have to correctly determine which one you have to use. Research a bit about the respective citation style and update your work, accordingly.
- Proofread and make the necessary edits
Obviously, when you are writing in a flow, it becomes difficult to determine your mistakes. Sometimes, you might over complicate a sentence structure, making your examiner confused on what you are actually trying to say.
Thus, we recommend that you always proofread your essays before submission. Look to improve clarity in your sentences and paragraph structures by paraphrasing and choosing simplified language.
The proofreading and paraphrasing can be done manually, but surely it will take a long time. Instead, you can paraphrase online by taking help of some automated tools.
These tools can suggest easier synonyms for difficult words, and change sentences to easier terms, massively improving clarity in your work.
Here’s an example to show you what we mean:
Using an online paraphraser can help you get better with conveying your ideas to your audience and gain more marks.
Check for more mistakes
Other than readability and clarity issues that we’ve mentioned above, there are a lot of other mistakes that you need to find and resolve in your essay as well.
Thus, we recommend going through your work twice before making the final submission. The final checks include checking for a clean structure of the content, and grammatical errors. Let’s see them in detail to understand better.
- Check clean structure
Keenly look at each heading of your academic document and make a quick read of it. Check if what you have written in in that section is agreeing to its heading’s title?
If you find some material irrelevant and not answering what is required by the particular section / heading, then consider removing it. This will significantly improve your content’s coherence.
Additionally, you should also check for a something we call a paragraph flow. Meaning, how smoothly is your talk transitioning from one para to another. This will definitely improve your content’s cohesion.
If you think your paragraph’s topics are changing abruptly, try using a different keyword for a paragraph before and after it, or re-write a particular paragraph.
- Check grammar
Finally, you are capable of submitting your work. There might still be issues with your grammar.
We know that you have mastered your art of academic writing but hear us out. Although most text editors have a built-in grammar checker, they aren’t really strong in terms of detecting hidden problems.
For example, a use of ‘then’ in place of ‘than’ might not be detected as a problem by any usual checker. But, if you use a smart tool like the Grammarcheck.ai, or Grammarly, then you are good to go.
Let us show you what we mean:
The text is corrected to:
Obviously, you can check the grammar errors yourself, but it would take up a lot of effort and time.
We understand the exhaustion you might feel after such a lengthy essay. And this is why we recommend using smart, automated tools to fix your problems.
Conclusion
In this article we discussed the techniques that can make your academic essays and documents truly mark-winning.
We saw how planned work can significantly improve your content’s cohesion and coherence helping you deliver your points across with efficiency.
We also reviewed other techniques like proofreading and rechecking your work for mistakes. And understanding the correct format, tone, and style of citations for achieving academic excellence.
We hope you enjoyed our post and grasped the advanced techniques for academic writing excellence that we discussed. If you want to look at some other tips to improve academic writing skills, you can check out the other posts that we’ve published on our website by clicking on this link.
Till then, take care, and best of luck with your exams!
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