5 Easy Tips to Improve Your Writing Skills

Many students find it difficult to master the process of writing and constantly encounter the same problems, when writing an academic paper or job application. 

The three most common writing difficulties, students are faced with, are:

• Getting the paper started: For most students it is difficult to get started. Once this first hurdle is overcome, one seems to write with more ease.
• Knowing what you want to say, but not how: Many students struggle about bringing their ideas down on paper and creating a coherent structure within the text.
• The text is either too long (or too short): Getting the length right is part of good writing, but most students write texts, that are either too long or too short.

Quite commonly do these challenges result in a writer’s block as both motivation and concentration rapidly decrease. Students often question their style of writing, get down on themselves for the inability to structure their thoughts. Peruse through the following tips and ideas to enhance your writing motivation, style and pleasure in it.

Plan First, Write Later

For some reason, most students consider the idea of planning a paper as time consuming and dispensable. However, to develop a mind map, a list of argumentations or even a mental image of the complete masterpiece does neither take too much time, nor effort, but allows for an initial structure to go along with. This kind of mnemonic serves you in ensuring to cover the topic. Moreover, you will be able to reproduce your progress as you go along with a list of articulated steps. Instead of “making it up as you go along”, you will focus on the pronounced goals this way.

Write In Steps

To start writing a paper just the night before the due date is a common phenomenon among students. Moreover, students argue they write best this way. Mostly, this is not true. In a writing process, the most important aspect is time management. You need to think ahead, give yourself ample time to plan, research, write and revise your text. The easiest way to do so, is to reserve a short time frame every day, so you can complete your paper in gradual steps.

Start in the Middle

To start writing is a common problem that all writers face. Instead of struggling for some profound argumentation, or awe-inspiring moment to open your paper with, try to skip the first paragraph and start from the middle. You can always return to the first paragraph at the end, constructing the topic’s introduction last. Try it, you will be amazed!

Write First Drafts

Start to write ignoring the format, the rules of grammar and vague statements, that need to be researched further. Going back and striving for perfect writing from the beginning will impede your writer’s flow. Drafts serve as an outline. Mistakes are corrected when proofreading afterwards - what you write does not matter, what you rewrite is what matters.

Follow Guidelines

In order to write a successful essay, you need to meet the requirements, mentioned in the assignment. That means - keeping in line with the minimum and maximum pages allowed. It is much harder to write a short rather than a long paper. Professors, therefore, do not ask you to write only six to eight pages, because they assume you cannot produce more on the topic. They do so because they are convinced you cannot write less than six. The important thing to know is, a text that is too long can be easily shortened, but a text that is too short is difficult to lengthen.