There is one thing that college students are good at: ignoring a pending essay deadline as if it didn’t exist. Forget about those who write the assignment on the last night before the paper is due: there are many who start writing in the early hours of the day the paper is due. They’ll tell you that they want to serve the paper while it’s still hot.
If you’re one of these people who write an essay just before its due, we’ve assembled seven tips to help you write faster and better even if you’re under pressure. Follow these tips and the essays you write will no longer be a mixture of ideas that don’t make sense, let alone fall short of the length requirements.
1. Get used to writing
No one is asking you to write a book in one day, all you need to do is make writing a habit: it gets easier with time. So, how do you turn writing into a habit? Write every day. It doesn’t matter how much you write or what you write about, even though working on you your college essays could be a good idea, just get writing. This ensures that you get the bad writing out of the way as you prepare to write a proper essay. Call it a warm up if you like.
2. Be clear about what you want to say
The great thing is that getting clarity about what you want to say doesn’t have to be done while you are writing. Think about what you want to say as you jog on the weekend, cook dinner or even try to get to sleep. You should be able to explain to your friend in one sentence what your main idea is.
For the majority of articles, such as blog posts once you are able to summarise what you want to say in one sentence, writing becomes much easier.
3. Grow the concept
Once the concept of what you want to write about is clear, you can now start growing it by breaking it into its constituent parts. These sub ideas will form the subheadings of the article or essay you write. Breaking down the ideas into several sub-ideas helps you to look for material that you will use to fill in those parts.
When you put down your ideas, it’s not too important to start worrying about the structure or some small typographical errors. You may not even need to worry about creating a perfect flow. You will deal with this when you are done writing and all your content is together. Laying out the work and giving it a proper flow is generally quite easy once you have finished writing.
4. Take a break
You are in a hurry to finish this piece of writing, but still, give it some time to sit. You will notice that when you come back you are more refreshed and you will start wondering where the new perspectives are suddenly coming from. Mistakes will also be easier to identify.
5. Edit
Since you’ve been writing fast, it’s most likely that there is lots of stuff that needs to be corrected, removed, and restructured. It’s time to do that now. Read the whole paper again with a fine eye that will help you to identify stuff that may need to be moved around, ideas that are confusing or need to be removed altogether, and words that have been overused. This should also be accompanied by proofreading to ensure that the spelling is right and there are no typing errors.
The most important task at this stage is to ensure that the average reader will be able to understand what you are attempting to say. While it is desirable, there is no way you will produce a piece of work that will please everybody. There is no need to be fanciful with the use of big words: essay writing is about being understood. The editing process also involves removing the words that are in the essay but do not make any difference even if they were not there.
If all this advice has come to you too late and you know there is no way you will be able to complete your essay in time, there are a number of services that help with your writing: you can always approach them and know that the paper will be delivered on time.
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