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What to do to Avoid Typical Writing Mistakes

Writing Consultants

Updated on Apr 27, 2018

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What to do to Avoid Typical Writing Mistakes
Most of the homework being given out these days by teachers and professors are of the essay writing kind. This forces students who are not good at expressing themselves in writing papers that depict their opinions in very poor written ways. These essay assignments often frustrate the students who do not have good writing abilities because they feel like failures when they cannot write the essay properly. Some of these students end up seeking an assignment writing service to help them avoid making mistakes.
While hiring an assignment writing service is always a good idea since the companies have professional writers who know how to avoid making writing mistakes, it is still important that the student learns how to avoid making the typical writing mistakes so that they can write simple essay papers themselves. Here are some tips to help students avoid making typical writing mistakes.
1. Identify the Writing Format
The first thing that the teacher or professor will tell the student about the writing assignment is the type of writing format that will be required. This could mean anything from the APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and Turabian format, just to name a few of the more popular paper formatting styles. These writing formats typically have examples in formatting online. These online samples include the cover page format, in-text citation formats, footnotes (where applicable), and bibliography listing. Learning how to write the paper in the correct format is normally the first step towards writing a proper essay or research paper.
2. Simply your Paragraphs
Students tend to overwhelm their paragraphs with too much information about various topics in the hopes that the “throw everything in” method of writing will help them write a good paper. That is so not true. Overwhelming the essay with too many topics per paragraph means the student is just throwing in talking points, but not really making a point in the paragraph. An effective paragraph has only one fully developed discussion topic. That is because the paragraph aims to fully inform, explain, and defend the stance of the writer. Once more than one topic is discussed, the whole paragraph becomes a confusing mess that does not help the student, as a writer, get the message across to the reader.
3. Remember Who You are Writing For
Students make the mistake of not thinking about who their reading audience will be for the essay. In this instance, the essay can go either of two ways. The first mistake is that the essay will become so verbose that it will read more like a dictionary than an essay. The other is that the wording will become simplified, the writer will prevent himself from writing an effective and informative essay. In either instance, the writer fails to communicate his thoughts to the reader properly. To avoid such instances, it would be best for the student to remember that the paper is being written for his peers. Meaning, people of the same age, so by writing it in a manner that will be understandable to those of similar ages, the paper will be better received and be perceived as an informative piece of writing.
4. Perfect Grammar and Punctuation are Not Optional
Perfect grammar in this instance means the student must keep an academic tone and presentation all the time. Slang words like “aren’t, gonna, yeah, or nope” have no place in an academic piece of writing.
5. Run-On Sentences Don’t Make Sense in the Long Run
Run-on sentences or sentences separated by commas will run the writer off the page. Use a period instead. That helps the reader to understand better the sentence meaning instead of stringing the sentences, which have different topic points, together and then hoping the reader can make sense of it. Place a period where required, a comma when useful, and other punctuation marks as necessary. For example:
Run-On: Jack and Jill went up the hill, to fetch a pail of water.
Proper Format: Jack and Jill went up the hill. They fetched a pail of water.
6. Verb Endings Make a Difference
If the action already happened, then you can’t use the present tense usage for its presentation. Verb endings create the idea of time in the sentence so that the presentation of the topic makes sense. For example, one cannot say “I drop the ball.” When the action has been done already. Hence, “I dropped the ball” would be the right way to present the sentence.
7. The Apostrophe Situation
There are several ways to properly use an apostrophe, which is most commonly misused in everyday writing. The apostrophe is used to represent a contraction or ownership. It is never used to connote the plural form of a word that is already in its plural form as a singular word. How’s that?
For Contractions:
It is = It’s
Do Not – Don’t
For Ownership:
Allan’s socks
Melissa’s food
8. Don’t Use Weak Qualifiers, Be Definite
Students these days tend to write the way they talk. They hate making definitive decisions, so they always try to respond to any question with a safety buffer in the middle. All responses are “sorta, kinda, and pretty much”. Meaning the student is not willing to fully support a piece of information that was written in the essay. This weakens the overall presentation and leaves the reader wondering as to what the writer really meant. When writing an academic essay, there is no halfway mark. The writer must commit to his statement or not at all. Strong statements are better appreciated without the qualifiers.
The mistakes that have been presented here are the most common writing mistakes that have a direct effect on the career of a writer. Since a writer uses his words to create an impression of his or her writing talents and skills, these ordinary everyday mistakes tend to create a weak impression of the writer. These mistakes create an unimpressive writing style that will lower the grade of the student who wrote it.
If you are a student who knows that writing you often present in class suffers from these problems, then it would be best if you consider hiring the help of an assignment writing service to make sure that your paper is edited to avoid these mistakes.
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