Master your English college paper writing skills with these top 5 tips

Sam Richards
Authored by Sam Richards
Posted Thursday, March 19, 2020 - 6:25am

Writing is hard. Putting together an English college paper can be dreadfully difficult, particularly if you have no idea what you are doing. Thankfully, we have this selection of writing tips for you. Follow these five tips, and we are sure that the quality of your English college paper will go through the roof. These tips really will put you on the way towards scoring the best grade possible.

Plan your college paper

There are a lot of people out there who will just jump into their college paper writing without having a clue what they are writing about. The result? A rather convoluted mess which will struggle to hit those C grades, let alone A. Don't let that be you.

When you are given a subject to write about, make sure that you know EXACTLY what you are supposed to be doing. Talk to your college professor if you are confused. They are there to help you out.

Once you know what you are writing about (including the style of the essay), you will want to take the time to plan every single section of it. So, know exactly what you are going to be writing for your introduction, body, and conclusion. Organize all of your ideas. You may not stick to your plan completely, but at least you will have some guidance. 

Do your research

Quality writing is the result of quality research. While an English college paper will often require a lot less research than if you were writing a paper in any other subject, research still needs to be done. One of your first stops is this page: https://copycrafter.net/research-papers-help.html.

You can (of course) only do research if you know what you are writing about. It will point you in the right direction e.g. looking for specific works on certain themes, or maybe 'reviewing' a book that you are currently reading.

In our opinion, if you want the best quality of writing, you are going to want to 'over research'. Make notes of more things than you could possibly ever fit into a single essay. Go off on tangents and discover new ideas. Try to think beyond those typical ideas for college essays. Think outside of the box. The more ideas you have, the easier it will be to follow the first tip for writing a college paper that we gave you.

Write your conclusion and introduction 'at the end'

The conclusion and introduction are arguably the most important elements of your writing. They are there, to sum up, everything else that you have written in your college essay. This means that they need to be written last. If you start off by writing your introduction, then you are really going to struggle.

Remember; the purpose of the introduction is to state what you are going to talk about in your essay. As you are writing your essay, you may tinker with ideas. You may think of new routes of discussion. This means that if you write the introduction first, you WILL need to go back and rewrite it. If you don't, then it is going to be wrong, and you are going to lose marks as a result.

Don't make it too complicated

Many people think that if you are writing a college paper, you need to use 'big and scary' words. You don't. A quality college paper (even one for an English course) is all about sharing ideas. You need the college paper to be easy to understand. You need every idea to be clear. You shouldn't be using words you don't know how to use. Sometimes it is better to keep your word usage simple, but share fantastic ideas using those simple words. 

Of course, nothing says that you can't through in a bit of complicated, technical writing on occasion. However, this is unlikely what your college professor is looking for. Basically; don't try to sound smart for the sake of sounding smart. 

Write multiple drafts

Finally; you need to produce multiple drafts of any college essay that you are writing. If you hand in your first draft, then you won't get a high mark. This is why you need to give yourself at least a week for your writing.

Produce your first draft. Edit it. Produce the second. Edit it. In fact, the majority of your marks when you are writing will come through the editing process. It is rare that you will ever be able to score the highest possible grade if you are not editing your work.

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