As a student, you will be required to write tons of essays, research papers, theses, and other documents. Your grade, of course, will be based on how well you write these papers, the flow of your thoughts, as well as the readability of your text.
Stuck on Your Essay?
Check out these example essays.
Use the tips below to help your essays stand out from the rest of the crowd:
1. Focus
Apart from focusing on your reader (the lecturer/tutor/professor), you also need to ensure that your writing is highly focused of its core purpose. Ask yourself why you are writing the essay and what you expect from the reader. Then, after you’ve penned it down and run it through an essay checking software program, read it back to yourself. This way, you will be able to find out whether you achieved your goal of making the essay focused on the topic required.
2. Writing Design
Next up, you should also design every essay you write in such a way that it fits in with the required format. Ordinarily, this means that you should start raising the readability of your text by ensuring that the content fits the theme, the question asked, and the course you are undertaking. Where possible, you should also add a couple of editing formats to make the text even more readable. A good example, in this case, is the use of quotation marks and indented paragraphs to refer to something written elsewhere or talked about by another scholar. Moving your narrative using direct quotes at certain strategic points in the essay will make the essay look better and more readable.
3. Paragraphs and Sentences
You might also want to learn how to break up your paragraphs and sentences. By shorting the length of the sentences in your essay, the person reading it will have an easier time understanding what you are trying to get at. To achieve this feat, look for any joints in your long sentences. Then, break them up into 2 or 3 shorter, easily digestible sentences. Similarly, change any dependent clause in your essay to an independent clause.
Of course, there will be natural relations between the overall length of the sentences you use and the paragraphs in your essay. After shortening your sentences, therefore, break the paragraphs up until they perfectly fit in with the altered rhythm of your essay. Similarly, try to minimize your use of semi-colons. Instead, add a period where you’d have placed the semi-colon. As long as the sentence following makes sense and relates to the entire paragraph, your essay should turn out perfectly.
4. Simplify It
Last but not least, simplify your essay as much as possible. Although you might think that using difficult and complicated words will make you sound smart, your reader (who will be grading the essay) will not be suitably impressed. The long and complex terms you should use must be technical terms that you simply can’t change. The rest will only make your essay hard to read – perhaps even harder than it was for you to research the try meaning of the words.
struggle as possible.
Conclusion
Over and above everything, the more readable your essay, the higher the grade you will earn. Use the above-described tips to improve the readability of your essays going forward.
