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7 Effective ways to improve your academic writing skills

Study Zone Institute April 28, 2023 English Tips

Academic writing is the formal type of writing that is used in universities and scholarly publications. It is commonly used in writing journal articles, books, essays, or any academic topic.

It is the phase that everyone has to go through in their university or college life. This phase is not easy because students are assigned to complete too many assignments or papers in a very short interval of time.

Some new students get unconscious when they are assigned to complete their first assignment. The reason for the unconscious is they don’t know proper or have proper guidance regarding academic writing.

Due to the lack of knowledge, some students make grammatical, spelling, punctuation, and other mistakes, which negatively impact the reader’s mind.

If you are also a newcomer student and looking for a way that can help you to improve your academic writing skills, then this post is going to help you.

Here we will show you some effective tips that can help you to improve your academic writing skills.

Effective tips to improve your academic writing skills

Build a habit of reading

The first tip that you should follow is to build a habit of reading daily. If you want to improve your writing skills, then reading is a very effective way. It is important because it builds new ideas and helps to understand how to use the words in the appropriate place.

Annie Proulx stated that: “Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”

So, to improve your writing, you can read blogs, articles, or any other piece of academic writing, which will help you to understand the writing style and tone. Furthermore, it also expands your vocabulary and helps you to determine advanced ways to use words.

Besides, when you write your article, try to read it multiple times and highlight your mistakes. This is how you can improve your writing skills.

Write regularly on academic topics

Writing on a daily basis on any academic topic is a very effective tip for improving writing skills. Even if you ask professional writers, they’ll also tell you one thing; practice helps a lot when it comes to writing.

Madeleine L’Engle once said, “Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour – write, write, write.”

Reading is the best way to improve your writing skills because when you read someone else’s write-up, you notice how they have written it, how they structure it, and how they use punctuation marks appropriately.

Other than that, when you develop a habit of writing one piece of content daily on any academic topic, then you have to read it by yourself. It will also help you to improve your vocabulary and grammar mistakes in your write-ups.

If you don’t read your writing, then how would you be able to learn from your mistakes? Remember, reading and writing are directly linked to each other when it comes to improving writing skills.

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Make your write-ups readable

Readability matters the most when it comes to improving writing skills. It is the ease with which a reader reads the written text. This enhances the integrity and authority of your writing. The more readable your write-up is, the more interesting it will be.

Now the question is, how to make the text readable? There are two ways that are very helpful in improving the readability of academic writing. One is to make your text readable manually, and the other is with the help of an online tool.

Manually, you can make your text readable by making some changes, which are:

Replace difficult words with easy synonyms
Shorten your sentence length
Nix some of your adjectives and adverbs
Break the lengthy paragraphs

By making the above changes in your text, you will be able to improve your readability. Here is a sample paragraph that we rephrased online through rephrase.info

In online rephrasing, you can take the help of a paraphrasing tool to improve the text readability. These online tools use very advanced AI-based technology that helps them to scan the text and make some changes to it (as shown above).

Moreover, you need to keep one thing in your mind: in changing the words with their synonyms, you need to be careful because some words create the same sound, but the context is totally different. So, try using the appropriate words when you manually improve the readability.

Avoid repetition in your academic writing

Repetition is also a major issue that can affect your academic writing skills. It happens when you repeat the words or sentences frequently, which is not good for students.

The repeated text is not good because it affects the quality of the text and also lowers the text engagement. When readers or professors are examining your academic writing, they are expecting something different and unique.

If you have repeatedly used text that is not making sense in academic writing, how does it makes a good impact on the reader?

To get some good marks on your academic paper, you need to remove the repeated text from your text or change it in different words. You can also seek help from online tools that can help you avoid repetition.

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Learn about sentence structure

Successful sentence structure is essential for good writing since it provides clarity as well as interest. Poor sentence construction can confuse or distract the audience, making reading more unpleasant than informative. Varying the length and structure of your sentences is a vital method to enhance a piece of writing.

Besides, if we talk about how we can improve the sentence structure, then here are some easy ways that can help you:

Write them in active voice
For linked items, use a parallel structure
Avoid using prepositional phrases excessively
Change the length and pattern of your sentences

This is how you can structure your sentences in an appropriate way.

Take help from your colleagues

In every class, there is an intelligent student present who has a good grip on writing and reading, and also professors or readers like their writing. Taking help from your colleagues is also an effective method to enhance your writing because they will mark or highlight your errors and instruct you to correct them.

You can also seek help from your teachers or professors. Every professor wants their students to get a pass or be successful in academic life. If you ask them for help, they will surely help you in improving your writing skills.

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Take some online courses

Another effective way that can improve your academic writing is taking some online courses. There are a lot of universities or institutions that offer short courses for students to improve their writing skills. They have made these courses available online for everyone, for free.

There are hundreds of different free academic writing courses available online. You can choose any one of them, and they will surely help you in improving your academic writing skills.

Conclusion

In this topic, we have talked about seven effective ways that can help students to improve their academic writing skills. The first tip that you can follow is to build a habit of reading and writing daily on any academic topic. This will help you to learn from your mistakes, and you will be able to avoid them next.

The other tip that you can follow is to take some online courses or classes from institutes professors. They will teach you in a good way and also help you to improve your writing to a professional scale.

Moving on, to make your writing better, try to use unique and readable text in your academic writing. Because as we discussed above, readability matters the most when it comes to writing skills. You can also rephrase your academic papers to make them readable.

We hope this topic will find helpful for you.