Writing a high-quality and successful essay is just as much about avoiding doing certain things as it is about following certain principles. However, many essay writing manuals either neglect this topic altogether or don’t pay it enough attention; which is exactly what we intend to rectify in this article. If you want to know which practices you have to avoid to write a good essay, read on!
- Forgetting to write your thesis statement: A thesis statement is a part of your essay (usually one or two sentences long) where you express the main idea of your entire text. Some students believe that it is clear enough from the title and the introduction of an essay, but it is not a good enough reason to forgo this essential part of a paper. Put it at the end of an introduction and make sure it serves as a connection between it and the body of the essay.
- Repeating the introduction in the conclusion: When reading recommendations on writing essays one can quite often see the conclusion to be described as little more than the rephrased introduction repeated by the end of the essay. However, any skilled writer will tell you that it is the wrong approach. When experts from a reliable writing service like AdvancedWriters.com write your essay they don’t repeat themselves – they sum up their findings, raise new questions resulting from the research carried out in the essay, explore the implications of their findings. You should do the same.
- Failing to proofread and revise: Of course, nobody is completely safe from making mistakes when writing, but there are ways to minimize their number and severity. Reread your essay multiple times concentrating on its different aspects every time. Ask a friend to read it for you and look for errors. Pay for essay to be proofread by a specialist. In other words, to everything to eliminate as many mistakes as possible, for there is nothing that harms your credibility more than glaring grammar and spelling errors in your writing.
- Spreading yourself too thin: In writing, “more” is not always synonymous with “better,” and it is especially true when it comes to essays, as they are supposed to be relatively small, highly focused assignments dealing with limited topics. This means that you, by definition, will have to drop some details in favor of others. As you have limited word count to work with, you will have to keep only the most important aspects of the topic and remove everything else, even if you would really like to write about it.
- Neglecting transitions between paragraphs: Even though your essay will consist of a number of individual thoughts and ideas, they should form a cohesive whole when put together. To achieve this, one has to use transitional words and sentences to connect individual paragraphs to each other and make sure they flow naturally one into another.
- Resorting to plagiarism: Perhaps it goes without saying, but some students are surprisingly careless when it comes to using other people’s writing in their own essays. Thus, you should remember the following – the only way to use a text written by somebody else in your writing is to cite it and give credit to the original author properly. If you don’t do it, even by mistake or oversight, you can (and most likely will) be accused of plagiarism, which is a very serious offense in academia.
- Failing to follow the format properly: When writing an essay in school or college, it is just as important to follow a particular format as it is to do research and actual writing. There is a number of academic formats, each with its own guidelines and rules, and it is not easy to transfer an essay from one format to another once it is finished. That is why you should make sure you know what format you should use before you begin writing and stick to it for the entirety of your work.
There is, of course, more to essay writing than this, but you can tremendously increase your chances of getting a good grade for your essay if you carefully avoid these mistakes – so good luck!