Dos and Don’ts in Writing an Essay

When you write an essay, it gets easier if you have the whole list of requirements in one place. This way you can organize your writing process in a more efficient way. This is the reason why we suggest this post to everyone who finds themselves at a loss when it comes to creating an essay. Our paper writers share with you the most important tips on what you should and should not write in your academic works. Having this advice in mind, you will produce quality writing that will bring in perfect grades.

Remember your goal

This is the most general advice that hints at several more aspects. First of all, bearing the goal of your writing in mind, you will find the best solution for organizing the text. An academic essay is almost always a research that has to show the development a certain idea. Therefore, you should structure your paper in a way that reflects this very idea from different angles.

Secondly, since the aim of your essay is purely academic, you should pay attention to a lot of formal criteria, such as the choice of words and grammar. We will dwell on these nuances in the next paragraphs.

Use the Active Voice

Structures with the Passive Voice are impersonal and “dry”. They may seem an ideal variant for your college essay, but this is a severe delusion. The first and the most essential argument against writing in the Passive Voice is that such sentences convey less meaning yet require more words as compared to the Active Voice. It makes your writing excessive in a way.

Use different sentence structures

Remember that the English language has a rich choice of dependent clauses and participial constructions. You should show your knowledge in them by varying types of sentences. If you fail to do so, your reader may be tired by the monotonous text, and this is true for both cases: when you use only brief sentences and only bulky ones.

We recommend you to introduce the main ideas in a concise manner, not to distract the reader from the main point. However, when you organize your arguments, you had better use sentences with multiple clauses that show various connections between your thoughts. You can achieve it by placing conjunctions: because, although, though, so and others.

Try to employ many terms

If you prefer to write in a simple language, it may be considered a drawback in academia. Avoiding necessary academic terms speaks of your lack of knowledge in them, and this is something you do not want to happen.

We will show you an example from literary studies. For instance, you have to analyze a sentence like this that you picked out from a book:

• Her voice trembled as a rose petal in the strong wind.

You may suggest that the author used a comparison here, which is introduced by the word as. And you will be right, but only partly. In literature, there is a special term for this kind of comparisons, and it is called simile. Failing to mention it in your essay, you automatically lower your grade for it.

The same is true for any domain. Whether you study humanities or science, terms should be applied everywhere. Besides, you must learn how to operate with them without messing the things up.

Make editing the last stage of the process

Having finished your essay, do not rush into turning it in immediately. At the very least, you have to check the whole work on your own first to make sure your writing is well-organized. The flow of thoughts must be clear, and your language must be academic. Without it, you spending so much time on your essay may eventually prove useless because of your professor’s discontent.

To be on the safe side, you can always turn to professionals in this case. Smart Essay Rewriter offers the services of professional paper editors who are adept at enhancing college and school essays. With our top-notch editing, you will avoid tiresome rewriting of your papers on your professor’s demands.

Avoid using first person pronouns

Now we move on to what you should not do when creating an essay. And the thing to start with is first person pronouns. This is an academic taboo because they make your essay too personal, which has a negative effect on your primary goal: to analyze something employing the strategies of critical thinking.

Stay away from contractions

Contractions help you make yourself brief in a conversation with your kith and kin. They are merely a means of saving up some time and expressing more thoughts while you still remember them. Contractions are also good in songs, where one must consider the number of syllables to suit the music.

But when it comes to academic writing, contractions are strongly prohibited. And that fact has its own advantages – for instance, writing two words do not instead of one don’t increases the wordage in your document. It may seem a drop in the bucket, but having split all the contractions across your document into two words, you get a considerably larger text.

Do not use slang

This tip must be pretty obvious after everything we mentioned above. Slang may be present in your essay only in one case: if your research has linguistic nature and deals with the peculiarities of English slang. In this case, feel free to use informal expressions as examples, but in all other situations stay away from them.

Now you have the whole picture of what you should and should not do when writing an academic essay. If you remember why you write an essay in the first place, all these tips become self-evident. Of course, you should stick with a formal writing style, but try to vary your sentence structures. Among the list of things to avoid, we can name first person pronouns and informal vocabulary. If you have any doubts as to whether you got it right in your paper, you can always rely on our professional services. We have our own secrets English editing and proofreading, and you can be sure we will use them to give our clients all the best of it.