For anyone going to University for anything but math, essays are an inadvertently inevitable requirement feared by the vast majority of University student’s contrarily anything else. This is why it is instrumentally intrinsic to learn how to write one so well, so that one day you will be excited to write an essay for the sole purpose of boosting your GPA.
Now many people think they are good at writing essays but if exams are not your forte, then you need vastly more than an 80 to keep your GPA up. My median and mode (middle/most common) grade is a 95% when writing essays; which is why I recommend the effective utilization of just a few of these simple strategies. After all, 95+ usually means that you should have gotten 100 but they usually only give those out in special occasions.
Forget the high school 5 paragraph essays
Make a strong introduction and conclusion
Find a topic that you truly find both interesting and meaningful
Never cheat the system
Less is more
Edit, edit, edit
Do it ahead of time
First, forget the high school 5 paragraph academic essay. For anyone not yet in University, forget everything you learned in high school about how to write an essay because it was all garbage, the 5 paragraph essay structure is for people that want a 60. Furthermore, write at a University students grammar level, which can be simply checked by pressing F7 (spell check) which if set up in the options menu on Word, can display you your grade level along with other readability statistics such as word count, sentences, readability, etc. To implement this press file, word options, proofing and then check the box that says ‘check readability statistics’.
After you do this, all of these statistics will be displayed every time you do a spell check. This can be used as a guide but should never be the primary reason for wording something a specific way. The take home point is to write normally for a more general audience but it is always important to sound academic when writing for a University class.
Second, make a strong introduction and conclusion. Your introduction and conclusion are a lot more important than the grades specifically attributed to them, if you start and end on a powerful note, then it will engrain the Primacy and Recency effect into your readers mind that your paper was awesome.
For anyone that doesn’t know what those psychological processes are, the Primacy effect refers to your short-term memory (STM) remembering the first thing that it saw when it started to read/see/do something and the Recency effect is when your STM is remembering the last thing it read/saw/did. Additionally, if your conclusion is powerful and effectively summarizes the entirety of your paper, then the Vividness effect will take effect as well by linking your conclusions main points to the more interesting and important aforementioned aspects of your academic essay.
The Vividness effect is when your mind is trying to retrieve information from your long-term memory (LTM) but can only remember specific points that stuck out, potentially convoluting the actuality of the events/words/thoughts being remembered. This is why the importance of directing your reader’s memory towards the points you want them to remember should never be overlooked, thus accentuating the instrumentality of a powerful conclusion once again.
Third, find a topic that you truly find both interesting and meaningful. This may sound a lot harder than it actually is but considering that University’s usually have incredibly vague outlines for assignments, being able to find something to write about that you truly find interesting may not be as farfetched as you might have presumed initially. If you actually care about what you are writing about, it will resonate throughout your essay, thus maximizing the quality of your work.
Fourth, never cheat the system. Although this sounds self-explanatory, I am not referring to plagiarism (even though obviously never do that). What I am referring to in actuality is avoiding the urge to adjusting fonts, period sizes, spacing and all of those cheap tricks that many professors can catch in an instant. These add no extra value to the essay and people that have to resort to this generally end up with a less than stellar grade.
Fifth, less is more. If a professor says write an 8 to 0 page essay, this does not mean that they want everyone to write a 0 page essay, it means that you now have a maximum and it is there for a reason. No professor or TA wants to read a hundred 0 page essays, let alone a hundred 8 page ones. If you have nothing to add and you hit the bare minimum requirement, then awesome, you are done, as long as your concrete essay consists of more than 8 pages of fluff.
If you write 8 solids pages, where every word counts, then you will get a far higher grade than the people that did their best to hit that 0 page mark just because they thought it would make themselves look more impressive. The ever emphasized notion of quantity is a waste of time as quality is the only thing that truly gets you the marks you want. After all, the conclusion will be remembered far more vividly than whatever was written in the center of the paper anyways.
Sixth, edit, edit, edit. Edit your paper until there is absolutely nothing you could possible imagine needs to be changed and once you’ve reached that point, edit it one more time. Also, ask as many people as possible to edit your paper so that you can maximize the number of available viewpoints being expressed within your paper. Our Although, you need to keep realistic expectations regarding the number of people you get to edit your paper considering the fact that most people will not want to do it, which is fine as long as at least one outside opinion.
Seventh, do it ahead of time. I know that this is the number one thing that people never do as the vast majority of University students only like to do things last minute. If you think about it logically, this will relieve you of your stress much earlier and allow you to accurately validate your topic of choice so that you are not left with a worthless topic with only a few hours left to go.
Inclusively, the aforementioned sixth point will be negated if adequate time for editing is not permitted once your paper is completed. Finally, the last reason to complete your paper ahead of is to avoid losing numerous tiny marks that you could have easily fixed by simply reading it over. In the end, a multi-grade level loss could be easily avoided simply by taking this step to heart.
These 7 steps are bound to help improve anyone’s grade level as long as they utilize them wholeheartedly in their application. Everyone wants good grades but no one wants to work for it but once you have mastered the art of concrete essay writing, getting those grades will feel as natural as procrastination was once.
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