Writing Tips For College Students

By Felix Chesterfield

One of the most difficult things for new college students is the need to write legitimate essays and reports. Many students are able to get into college having written nothing more than 250 word documents with merely adequate grammar. For these students, English Comp and liberal arts courses will offer a whole new ballgame. It can be expected that most future college graduates will have to write multiple 10+ page papers in the course of their education. While that may sound daunting to some of you, fear not! Follow these simple writing tips and you will do fine:



Pick an interesting topic: Unlike in high school when topics are assigned you, typically in college you get to choose your own. It is very important that you choose something as interesting and even personal to you as possible. Your writing will be infinitely better if it is a subject that you can relate to and maybe even enjoy writing about. On the flipside, think of the phrase “you can’t put lipstick on a pig.” By the same token, you cannot write well on a terrible topic. Every other writing aspect flows from this.



Plan your work: Too many students just sit down and write and let the writing take them whenever. This may have been a method that worked for J.R.R. Tolkien, but I would not recommend it for most writers. This usually leads to rambling and tangents that make an essay appear incoherent and lose any flow from one paragraph to the next. Instead, plan out what you intend to say and where you are going to say. Outlines are a great way to make sure that your writing all fits within an overall framework.



Focus on the thesis: The thesis is the single most important aspect of a paper. Every subsequent point should be supporting the thesis, or supporting a point that is supporting the thesis, or…well, you get the picture. The thesis is, in a sentence or two, what you are trying to say with your writing. What are you trying to convince the reader? The actual bulk of the paper is telling the reader why your thesis is true and important.



Follow grammar/citation rules: It does not matter how good your topic, plan, and thesis are if you fill your paper with spelling and grammar errors. Nobody is going to take an unreadable paper seriously. Deservedly or not, it reflects poorly not just on your writing, but also on your overall intelligence.



Proofread: Shockingly, many students are so excited to type the last word of their paper that they consider it done at that point. This could not be further from the truth. It is absolutely critical that every student proofreads their work (and preferably gets somebody else to do it as well). This will ensure the paper’s overall readability and whether or not the writer has adhered to the previous points: Is the thesis clear? Does the paper flow from the thesis? Are there grammar errors or spelling errors that need to be corrected?



Follow these steps and when the professor asks your for a twenty page dissertation, you will respond with: “Just twenty?”



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