5 Proven Tips to Write Better Essays in English

English is one of the most spoken languages in the world. Approximately 1.35 billion people in the world speak English. In many countries, English is not even the official language yet people still learn it because it is so widely used.

Essay writing in English is a great exercise to improve your command of it. Usually, essays are required in schools. They are assigned to students as homework or assignments. Teachers can also use them as a method of testing their students.

Anyhow, the point is that you want to learn how to write better essays in English. So, we are going to teach you some things that will improve your essay writing considerably.

1. Write an Outline

Before you can get started on writing an English essay, you have to sit down and think first. You need to think about what your topic is, what kinds of things can you talk about, and in what order will they be discussed.

Once you have thought long and hard about this, you can create an outline. This outline is a road map of your essay. It is made with rational thinking backing it up. However, thoughts don’t stay with you all the time. It is possible to forget a mental outline while writing and start rambling.

With a written outline that is no longer a concern. An outline is the first step in writing a great English essay. Once you are done with it, you can start moving on.

2. Avoid Using Colloquialisms

Colloquialisms are words and sayings that are improperly used during casual speech. Phrases like “gonna” and “wanna” are considered colloquialisms.

Students and non-English speakers usually have a difficult time figuring out if something is colloquial or not. They can get confused by these incorrect wordings and phrases.

Incidentally, they also aren’t a part of real, formal English, so, you can get points taken off for using them.

That is why it is a good idea to start learning what does and what does not count as colloquialisms and avoid them in your essay writing.

3. Write Short Sentences and Paragraphs

Writers and students can get caught up in showing off their lexical prowess. That is good and can net you a lot of points, but only if the subject was literary in nature. For all other types of essays, we don’t need to go out of our way to use powerful vocabulary and difficult words.

In fact, it is better to keep things simple. The point of an essay is to get your opinions and arguments across to your reader. This should be done in a way that facilitates them. The best way to do it is to keep your sentences and paragraphs short and to the point.

Skillful writers can write short sentences without compromising the flow, but those who can’t can rely on online tools.

So, simply put, just go and rephrase online with a tool. A rephrasing tool can replace parts of a sentence to make it shorter. It can do this by using a word to replace a phrase. Since most tools like this use AI, their word choices are quite apt for the situation as well.

Most tools that rephrase online are free and have generous word limits. That means even students can use them with ease. So, have at it and make all your essays have short sentences and paragraphs.

4. Do not Plagiarize Others

Committing plagiarism is guaranteed to make your writing skills regress instead of improving them.

Learning to write better by reading others is a valid technique, but copying their words and structure is not. It reduces your own capability to think for yourself and damages your creativity.

As such, striving to create unique write-ups is a great exercise to improve your essay writing skills. Learning starts from imitation, so, it is not out of the question that you unconsciously copy writers that you admire. But true learning is when you grow beyond it and develop your own style.

However, that is a long road. To aid yourself and track your progress, you can rely on tools. In short, you want to write an essay and then check it for plagiarism with the help of a plagiarism checker.

With a plagiarism checker, you will be able to see how much content you have unknowingly copied from other people. Then you will know what kinds of things to avoid. In this way, you will soon develop a unique and improved writing style for your essays.

5. Proofread for Grammar Mistakes

Revision and proofreading are one of the most basic and effective techniques for improving essay writing skills.

Proofreading can help you find out your usual mistakes that you overlook. Most writers do not create a masterpiece on their first try. They revise their initial draft multiple times with the help of their editor. That is what ultimately leads to the amazing final product that we get to read.

So, you need to do the same. Of course, as a student, you probably won’t have access to a professional editor. But here are a few things you can do:

• Read your work out loud to yourself
• Get a friend or family member to check your work
• Utilize relevant tools such as grammar checkers

Reading aloud is better for finding your own mistakes because all your attention is focused on your write-up. You can notice mistakes such as missing conjunctions, incorrect spelling and punctuation errors as well as sentences that could be rephrased.

You get the same result when you get another person to read your stuff. The final method is the least useful because you can only find common grammar mistakes and nothing else.

Anyhow, by proofreading, you find and fix your own mistakes, consequently, you make fewer mistakes in the future, and that is called improvement.

Conclusion

Improving skills of any kind involves time and practice, if either is lacking, there will not be any improvement. All the tips that we mentioned in this article, require both time and practice either directly or indirectly.

That is why you must keep writing diligently to see any visible improvements in your essays. Practice these tips while writing and soon you will be writing excellent essays like nobody’s business.