Tips to Improve your writing

Essays are, in many people’s opinions, a huge pain in the ass. They take a long time, are difficult to edit, and are difficult to improve upon. Improving your writing isn’t an easy task, but focusing on being clear, original, and thesis-driven can help you produce a well structured essay. Being clear and concise makes you seem professional and well organized, while analytical thoughts are important in proving your essay’s thesis.

        Focusing on being clear and concise is important for an essay writer. Redundancies and unnecessary words should be avoided as much as possible. Phrases such as “The line describes how”(Shao, Poem-Story Comparison), “This shows”(Shao, Poem-Story Comparison), and “For example”(Shao, Station Eleven Critique) add nothing to the essay. The writer of these essays has a hard time cutting to the point. Not only does he/she use unnecessary phrases, but he/she also reuses the phrases many times, which makes the essay seem very redundant and unprofessional. Essay writers should also make sure that their words are adding actual content to the essay. A sentence like: “Amy Tan’s 'Two Kinds' and Elizabeth Eyber’s 'Poet as Housewife' have a number of similarities and differences” doesn’t mean anything. It adds no additional content to the essay and creates no additional insight for the reader.

        Being Analytical should also be a point of focus for a writer. An essay writer should focus more on his/her own ideas and interpretations to support his/her claim, as opposed to what’s done in the following quote: “In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a famous Scottish general named Macbeth is told by three witches that he will become the king of Scotland. He later kills his own king… (Shao, Aaron Hernandez and Macbeth).” A story, anecdote, any background information, or a summary should be brief and shouldn’t take up the majority of an essay. This writer is spending too much time telling the story. The summary takes up the majority of the paragraph while analytical ideas and claims are lacking. The writer can also be more analytical by thinking about what makes their claim significant. In the same “Aaron Hernandez and Macbeth Essay,” the writer states “Shakespeare’s play and the Hernandez case connect with each other in multiple ways” as his/her thesis statement. This writer should consider digging deeper, and addressing what makes this significant. The writer could’ve explored an idea on the lines of how power, recognition, and fame are an underlying theme in cases of this nature (murder).

        Tying everything back to the thesis statement is another important aspect for an essay. Often times, an essay can stem into a paragraph that has nothing to do with the thesis or “the goal of the essay.” In the “Poem-Story Comparison,” the writer has one paragraph that ends with “… the two characters are in somewhat similar scenarios, but Tan’s character is still in a much better situation than Eyber’s.” This sentence doesn’t mean that much when the thesis is stating that the roles of the characters are similar. The writer should consider using this information to explain what to tie back to his/her thesis, so that the reader knows why it’s important. “Mandel paid a lot of attention to her writing style and structure, which was definitely an important aspect of the book, (Shao, “Station Eleven Critique”)” is a sentence from another essay that comes out of nowhere, and doesn’t have much to do with the majority of what is said in the essay. The writer spends three paragraphs talking about the character development, the plot development, and the predictability of a novel, and then spends about two or three sentences on the novel’s diction and writing style. This portion of the essay seemed forced, and lacked any good transitions with the other body paragraphs.

Being concise and clear within the essay, along with having original, thesis-driven, analytical ideas are important in refining one’s writing style. Avoiding redundancies and unnecessary words keeps the essay on track and makes the writer seem professional. Original and analytical ideas help support the claim made in the thesis,  and should take up the majority of the essay, while summaries and background information should be short and brief. Any argument based paper, whether it be concerning History, Spanish, English, Sciences, Research, etc. can follow these guidelines of writing improvement.