Essay Writing Mastery - Proven Strategies for Academic Success 2024

7 Proven Strategies for Better Essay Writing

Below are some of the most effective strategies that you need to follow in order to write excellent essays.

1. Get Familiar with the Teacher’s Instructions

To write better essays, you (the student) first have to get familiar with the teacher's instructions. This is an essential strategy, because how you can write a perfect essay when you don’t know the guidelines or requirements?

Understanding instructions not only involves getting familiar with the topic, instead, it also involves understanding multiple other things. For instance, the teacher may ask students:

• To address a certain point of the topic in detail
• A certain word limits
• Add graphs/stats about the topic

And so on…

When you are familiar with the instructions, you can perfectly tailor your essay according to it, and earn both good grades and teachers' respect.

 

2. Performing Thorough Research

You have to perform in-depth research to come up with an effective essay. The research will introduce you to the latest and most updated information about your essay topic. Along with this, it will give you the opportunity to collect evidence that you add to your writing to make it authoritative.

However, while performing research, students should not rely on a single source to gain information, instead, they should explore different sources (blogs, journals, e-books, etc.). Keep in mind that, you should only gather information from credible sources so that there is no chance of adding inaccurate data to the essay.

When you have performed thorough research, your essay will contain the most useful and appropriate information that will be enough to make your essay stand out.

 

3. Organize Your Material with the help of an Outline

No matter how much information you have about a particular topic, what matters is how efficiently you describe it to others. That is why, it is considered an effective strategy to organize your material (thoughts or ideas) by creating an outline.

Creating an outline will allow students to understand how they will effectively connect all the information to provide support to the main argument. Additionally, it will allow them to determine what points/arguments need to be addressed first.

Along with this, an outline will act as a roadmap for them, so that they can easily proceed with writing the essay.

The best thing about creating an outline of the essay is that it will give you the authority to quickly change or manipulate the ideas without needing to entire paragraphs.

 

4. Write the essay using your own words

You should write the essay using your own words. This means, do not try to copy and paste information from online sources. And the truth is most students do this, to save their time and effort. But let me tell you copying information from online sources will be considered as “Plagiarism – a serious academic offense.

Submitting a plagiarized essay can have severe consequences. For instance, you may get lower grades, fail in the term, or even face suspension.

That is why, it is necessary for students to write essays using their own words. But even if they write in their own words there is still a strong chance that some of their written sentences or paragraphs may accidentally match with someone else, resulting in plagiarism. This is so because there are already a lot of essays regarding every topic available on the internet.

So, if you also face the issue of plagiarism, then there are multiple ways you can try. You can consider rewriting the specific part to break the pattern of plagiarism. Another way is utilizing an online word changer which will automatically make the given 100% unique by making changes (such as replacement of words and alteration of sentence structure) to the given text.

When your essay is 100% unique, it will definitely gain the teacher’s special attention, allowing you to stand out among all.

 

5. Follow the Right Structure

A high-quality essay is one that follows a proper structure or format. When an essay is properly formatted it will not only look appealing but also become easier for the readers to quickly skim the information given in it.

What I have researched, a well-structured essay follows a five-paragraph format. The first paragraph is the introduction, the next are the main body paragraphs, and the last one is the conclusion.

However, you should keep sentences short, not more than 25 words. Along with this, try to explain the main information or ideas using bullets or numbering. This is so because these are quicker to read as compared to paragraphs.

Useful tip: Students should make use of transitions to build a smooth flow between multiple paragraphs of the essay. Transitions are basically special words and phrases such as “Besides,” “then,” “Moreover,” etc. that connect one idea with another.

 

6. Add References

If you have used any kind of information or statistics from another author in your essay, then you should add a reference to it at the end.

Doing this will not only allow the teacher to relocate the original source and verify the information that is included in the essay but also give a good impression to the student that he/she has acknowledged another person’s work.

Remember, if you do not add references to external information that you have used in the essay, then it will be considered plagiarized. Because you are trying to pretend another person’s work as your own.

There are a number of ways through which you can add references. Some of the major ones are as follows:

• Using MLA format
• Using APA
• Chicago style

Generally, the references are added at the end of the essay.

 

7. Proofreading

Proofreading is also an effective strategy that will help to make sure the written essay from completely perfect in every aspect. It is recommended by teachers to students to carefully go through the written essays before submitting them.

While proofreading the essay, students have to ensure multiple things:

For instance, they first confirm whether the essay is efficiently fulfilling the guidelines and also properly addressing all the arguments. And if any argument needs to be changed, do not hesitate to change it.

Apart from these, students also confirm the essay is completely free from all kinds of grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes. If any are found, immediately correct them, as they can damage the overall quality of the essay.

Finally, you need to check plagiarism in your written essay even if you have written it using your own words. The only way to check for plagiarism is by utilizing an online plagiarism checker tool that will scan and compare your given text with millions of online resources in order to find any instances of plagiarism.

 

Final Words

Writing and submitting high-quality essays is highly crucial for students if they want to achieve academic success. However, writing good essays requires following the right strategies. In this blog post, I have explained the seven most effective strategies that students can use to come up with better essays.