Writing skills is a very important skill. Now, content is just an indispensable part of any business, and the quality level of writing is significant to you both in college and at work. In college, our students study under the Anglo-Saxon system, in which professors evaluate the level of knowledge in subjects by the way you write papers.
What’s more, with more and more academic courses moving online, the number of essays students have to write is constantly on the rise. You can be a great speaker or do well on tests, but if you’re not good at writing essays and other types of papers, it’s going to be hard for you to get good grades.
If you are a student, then you can read this article and think about how you can teach yourself writing skills, strengthen them. If you are a teacher, then this article will help you improve your students’ writing skills.
Emphasize the Practical Importance of Writing
In general, everything always depends only on motivation. There is no such thing as laziness. In fact, laziness is either fear or a lack of understanding of the meaning of what to do something for. Therefore, if it seems to you that your students are lazy, then foremost all you need to work on their motivation. First, you need to tell in detail why writing skills are needed and not only within the academy.
For many students, good grades are not essential. They just want to get a degree and get to work. Especially for such people, stories about why writing is so important in the daily life of any professional work well. Tell them about content for business, about the rules of business correspondence, about how companies do advertising, about how to present your ideas, and so on. Tell us about where writing skills are needed and that the faster and better a student masters them, the more chances they have to become a highly paid professional.
Teach to Plan Writing Realistically
Quite a few students can write well in general and when they have the time and mood, they can write very high quality papers. But the problem is that you are not preparing writers, but students who need to complete essay writing assignments and other types of work in a given time frame.
Therefore, you must teach them how to organize writing. It is important for them to track the time from the very beginning that they spend on writing this or that essay, because it always seems to us that we are doing it faster than in reality. What if we need two days to write an essay, then we will sit and write for a full two days. But it’s not. It is necessary to plan realistically, leave time for force majeure and to break down work into small iterations so that the brain does not get tired and has enough rest.
Play with Brief “In-Class” Writing Exercises
For many students, problems with writing text are problems of volume. That is, you see a big task in front of you that you need to comprehend, do research on it, write it in compliance with all the rules, and you just don’t raise your hand to take on this task. There is also such a thing as a fear of a white sheet.
To cope with this, give short writing assignments in the classroom on a daily basis and then students will pump up, learn to write quickly on short topics, and they will no longer be so afraid to start more serious assignments. Also, you can quickly find some mistakes and students will no longer make them in a big and important work.
Teach them to Know the Audience
For students, the main audience is professors, and they are obliged to read what is written. But in real life, each text has its own audience, and you need to remember this even when writing an academic essay, because they also have different types, which means different voices, and it is directed, as it were, to a different audience.
So you need to teach students to find this virtual audience and think about what text, with what vocabulary and expressions, this audience would like to read. If you constantly think about what the professor will think, the texts will be quite boring, basic, and completely bleak.
Give Practical Tips on Proofreading and Formatting
It is important to teach students not only the theory of writing, but also to show practical tips and tricks that help make writing more efficient, faster and better. We are sure that you yourself use various professional services. For example, services for proofreading or plagiarism checks or the site generator, which help to arrange everything at the right level. Don’t worry that students will abuse them.
Many people use them anyway. They are absolutely legal. Better teach students how to use them correctly. Anything that makes life easier should be used. Then they will have time to do qualitative research, and this is the key to writing a good essay. And most importantly, it will save time for creativity so that the student can show individuality in his work, present interesting material, and offer his own way of thinking. So the work will attract the attention of the target audience and the desired result will be achieved. And if a student spends all the time dealing with mundane tasks that a legit essay writing service, such as Smart Writing Service, can do for them, then there will be no time and desire left for any creativity and imagination.
Teaching writing to students is quite a difficult job, because it is difficult for students to understand the connection between what they are learning now and what they will really need in their work. It is very important to show them this connection.
Don’t expect everything you give to be used. But we hope you enjoy knowing that at least some of what you put in will stay in the minds of students and help them get better grades during their studies and later advance in their career.
