Effective Ways to Improve Student Writing

Good writing skills are important not only for the academic performance of a student. All that academic writing assigned in school is set to prepare you or a lifetime of creating content. While you might not need to write an essay when you graduate or do argumentative writing in your life, you’ll need good skills to communicate, write emails, and more.

From prepping presentations for work to sending emails to clients, writing is a daily task for most professionals across different industries. This is why you get assigned written tasks too often – because practice helps you develop this skill.

While practice is very useful, you can do a few extra things to get better at writing faster. Let’s take a look at them.

1.   Use Tools to Boost Your Writing and Your Grades

Thanks to technology, it is now easier to improve your writing, find your mistakes, and land high grades. For starters, the Fixgerald plagiarism checker for students is very useful for checking your research assignment or homework before submitting it to your teacher in college or university. Unintentional plagiarism is a real thing, and you cannot work toward skill building without acknowledging it – or taking actions to remove it. A student can get in a lot of trouble if the professor finds plagiarism in their articles or essays. In just minutes, you can automatically check for copied content and ensure that your paper is original.

You can use tools for editing or proofreading your essays. You can use them to check your reading level and make the student essay easier to understand. By using tools, you can work on your writing skills. Plagiarism checkers will help you find out if you aren’t citing sources properly. Editing tools will tell you which adverbs you use too often, whether you use a passive voice frequently, how readable your content is, etc.

2.   Read as Often as You Can

Yes, student life is busy and stressful, but this is no reason to skimp on one of the most educational activities – reading. When you read, you can see how others craft content. This will help you improve your reflective writing skills and allow you to see different writing styles.

It’s not just that. When we read, we subconsciously track the descriptive or analytical writing of the author. We also memorize new words and phrases. Whether you read a blog or a novel, you’ll come across words that will improve your vocabulary.

All of this can be very useful when you sit down to write your own content.

3.   Do Some Journaling

Good writing skills are acquired with practice. This is the best way to improve the skill – by writing as much and as often as you can. Most students make the mistake of writing only for academic purposes. How often do you sit down to do some free writing that’s not assigned in school?

Writing for fun or scribbling in your journal is far less stressful compared to academic writing. It’s a great way to express yourself, clear your thoughts, and practice your writing. By using a journal, you can work on your vocabulary and expressive skills, as well as improve your grammar and spelling.

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This doesn’t have to take a lot of time – not at all! Write in your journal for 10 to 15 minutes a few times a week, or maybe even every day. After a while, you’ll notice how it becomes easier to express yourself. Writing down your thoughts helps you organize them and allows you to think more creatively.

4.   Use Feedback

All those tools at your disposal will help you tweak your papers and improve them, but that’s not all. You can use them as feedback, a way to improve your writing skills.

Don’t stop there, though. In your life, you will get feedback from colleagues, mentors, bosses, friends and family. This is the point where you need to learn how to write well, and there’s no shame in asking for feedback.

Approach your mentor, your family member or a trusted friend and ask them to review your writing. Maybe your school has a writing resource center you can use, too. You can join online groups, writing classes, or form a group with your peers.

5.   Brainstorm and Outline

Good writing starts with planning. Don’t start writing on a blank page. Find the data, brainstorm it, and outline it. This will help you with the structure afterward, and you’ll spend far less time on writing and editing if you have an outline in your hands.

Wrapping Up

Good writing skills don’t happen overnight, but it’s not all that hard to obtain them. All it takes is some dedication and a lot of practice. If you do the things in this list, you’ll notice the improvements really soon.