No matter you are a language major or not, you still need essay writing skills throughout your academic career. Sometimes, you need to write an essay for your assessment, for college entrance, to compete in an essay writing competition or appear in a competitive exam. In all these situations, essay writing skills become your lifeline, which you need to survive. But not everyone has good essay writing skills.
Some people have a good hold on language, but lack of analytical abilities. Others have exceptional analytical abilities but have poor reasoning. While some others are good in both analytical and reasoning abilities but have poor language skills. In either of the cases, you can’t come up with an essay which makes you stand out in college entrance assessment, wins you writing competition or clear your competitive exam.
But even if you are not born with good writing abilities, you can still polish your skills to become an essay pro – better than those born with essay writing abilities.
Here are given some tips to make you a pro in essay writing:
Reading is Essential:
Though students hate it when teachers ask them to read books or give book reading for monthly assessment. Nobody likes to read books comprised of 200-300 (or even more) pages with difficult themes and vocabulary. But teachers don’t stress on book reading just because they have to give you something for assessment, so let book reading be the one. All the book reading’s recommendations are for your own good.
You can improve your language and vocabulary, broaden your vision, get familiar with different writing styles, learn new expressions, know about different genres and learn the art of presenting ideas and knitting them together – all this through book reading. So, if you want to develop good writing skills, then first develop reading habits. It will do wonders!
Art of Planning:
Essay writing is just like building a house or any other architect. You can’t build a house randomly without any planning. Similarly, you can’t write a good essay without prior planning. You have to plan out which point should come at the beginning, which point should be part of the climax and which part should give conclusion note.
Most students miss out on this point. They start jotting down anything that comes in their mind immediately after looking at the topic. Result? A mass of words with no direction, no proper beginning and end, no core idea, and with no sense.
You need to learn the art of planning an essay.
- Roughly jot down the initial ideas which hit your mind.
- Try to develop a connection between ideas.
- Make a flowchart or spider web to indicate the direction and flow of the content.
- Sit back and see if you need to replace something with another idea or need changes in the flow.
Initially, it will take you 3-4 hours to plan out an essay, but once you learn the art of planning out an essay, the process will become easier and less time consuming for you.
Practice Makes You Perfect:
The person who said that practice makes a man perfect was right. Practice really makes a man perfect, even in essay writing. Even natural born writers need the practice to polish their skills. You don’t need only high-end topics to write an essay. Take any topic randomly and start writing on it. This will not only strengthen your ability to write on various topics but will also help you to identify your mistakes, your pitfalls, and develop analytical and reasoning skills.
Not everyone is a born writer, but by following these tips, you can become a good writer and wash away all the past memories when the thought of writing an essay haunted you for days.
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