7 Valuable Tips for Students to Improve English Writing Skill
You probably have to write a lot If you are a student, It can be essays, assignments, research papers and a lot of lecture notes as well. When writing these types of materials, you need to have outstanding English skills so that the quality of your work stays up to the mark.
In this post, we will look at seven valuable tips you can apply to improve your English writing skills. They’re all easy and actionable, and you can easily incorporate them into your usual work routine without any trouble.
Let’s get started.
While mentioning these tips, we’ll try and keep them brief and concise so that you can easily go through them and move on to the next one.
1) Make a Reading Habit
This is something that we endorse with our own experience. There is perhaps no other method that can help you in improving your English skills than reading.
By reading existing literature like articles, blogs, books, etc. you are able to build your vocabulary, learn different ways to structure sentences, get familiar with some literary colloquialisms, enhance your own writing style, and so on. All of this can passively help in improving your skills.
So, to make a reading habit, all you have to do is set some time to go through some literature on a daily basis. We’re stressing on doing this daily because inconsistency in the habit can make it less fruitful.
As for what you should read, that depends on your own choice and preference. You can read blogs, articles, newspapers, books, or anything else that suits your fancy. However, you should take care to read something that is written expertly and professionally. There’s not going to be a lot of benefit in reading the work of a rookie.
2) Expand Your Vocabulary
As a student, it’s useful to have a stock of synonyms available for every word that you write in your assignments and essays. Normally, in write-ups like blogs, people don’t like the author flaunting their vocabulary (unless it’s for humorous purposes). But, it’s not the same in academic writing. Academic pieces like essays and research papers are the perfect places for going loose with complex vocabulary.
To increase your vocabulary, there are a number of different things that you can do. The simplest and straightforward method to go about it is to simply take a dictionary and a thesaurus, and then go through the columns learning new words. But, this method can get a little boring after a while.
There is another technique that you can try for improving your vocabulary. It’s a little unorthodox, but it can be effective if done regularly. This technique is to simply paraphrase your content. Of course, when we say ‘paraphrasing’ your content, we don’t mean doing it yourself. Rather, we mean using an online tool for it.
A paraphrasing tool is typically designed to replace certain random words in the content with their synonyms. There are other types of changes that it can make as well, but the synonymizing gimmick is pretty much always there.
The benefit of using a paraphrasing tool in this way is that you get to see the new words in their right places in your own content. This helps you easily understand their meaning as well as the instances where they (the words) can be utilized.
3) Practice Writing on a Regular Basis
In order to improve your writing skills, you have to put into practice whatever you learn. If you’ve learned some new words, you have to use them a couple of times before you properly get properly familiar with them. Similarly, if you’ve learned a new writing technique or a tip to improve your style, you have to put it into practice.
To do this, you should create a habit of writing some practice content on a daily basis. Just as you should do some reading daily, you should balance it out with some writing as well. This way, you will be able to take in everything you learn by practically performing it.
4) Avoid Using Passive Voice in Your Write-Ups
7 Valuable Tips for Students to Improve English Writing Skill
This is also a great tip that you can follow to improve your English writing skills.
Using active voice can help make your write-ups look confident and easy to understand. In academic write-ups like essays, this is something that can greatly help in improving the quality of your work.
For example, saying “After perusing the study, we came to the conclusion that the results were more inaccurate than otherwise…” is much better and clearer than saying “After the study was perused, the conclusion was arrived at that the results were more inaccurate than otherwise…” In this particular case, the first sentence is in active voice whereas the second is in passive.
Plus, once you get the hang of always prioritizing the use of active voice, you will start doing it unconsciously.
5) Learn About Your Grammatical Weaknesses
There are some grammatical mistakes that can be more commonly made by an individual as compared to others. For example, some people may have difficulty understanding when to use colons and semicolons whereas some people may find it hard to understand the rules of punctuation and capitalization in bulleted lists, etc.
So, in order to improve your English writing skills, you have to figure out the type of errors that you are prone to make. Then, after figuring this out, you can move on to addressing and rectifying them.
There is an easy way to find out such grammatical mistakes. You can simply use grammar-checking software on your write-ups and look at the errors that it (the software) highlights.
In order to get the full benefit of this exercise, it is necessary for the grammar check to be done using a reliable and accurate tool. The reliability and accuracy of such a tool refer to its ability in pointing out the mistakes in the input without missing any of them.
To find a good grammar checker, you can look for online guides and comparison articles. After finding a reliable one, you can use it regularly on your content in order to fix and rectify grammatical errors.
6) Be Careful of Comma Splices and Run-On Sentences
Although comma splices and run-on sentences are grammatical errors and you can find them using a grammar checker (as discussed above), we are mentioning them separately here since they can be commonly made by amateur writers.
A comma splice is an instance in which two independent clauses that are supposed to be joined using a colon, semi-colon or conjunction are connected using a comma instead. What a comma splice looks like, is here:
The weather was cold, he put his jacket on.
The correct version of this sentence is:
The weather was cold so he put his jacket on.
Similarly, a run-on sentence is an error in which two independent clauses are joined together with no punctuation or conjunction whatsoever.
You have to be extra careful about these errors when writing an assignment. This will help in improving your writing skills, and also in making your write-ups more coherent.
7 Valuable Tips for Students to Improve English Writing Skill
7) Learn to Order and Organize Your Sentences
This is also a useful tip that you can follow to improve your English writing skills.
Whenever you want to write an assignment, be it an essay or a research paper, you have to make sure that you write the content in an organized and structured way.
The way your write-ups appear to the reader vastly depends on how it is organized. A mediocre piece of content having proper organization will look aesthetic to the reader whereas an exceptional masterpiece-level write-up with poor organization will look unappealing.
Conclusion
There are a lot of other steps and tips as well that you can follow for improving your writing skills. However, the ones that we pointed out in the post above are a good place to get started.
By reading other people’s works, increasing your vocabulary and applying all the other tips that we’ve listed above, you will see an improvement in your writing. It will take time, but you have to keep at with patience and consistency.
7 Valuable Tips for Students to Improve English Writing Skill
Related Term
Importance of Learning English