If you give anyone a watercolor and brush, he or she can at least paint a wall or any flat surface. However, will you love the result? Or, can you hire such a person to paint your home? Of course, you won’t commit your money to contracting a person with limited experience or knowledge. As such, you’ll require an expert who understands the material inside and out and can use different painting tools like a palette knife to deliver exceptional service. So, what about writing?
Apart from high school and college students, anyone in the corporate world and entrepreneurship requires writing skills for conveying information. However, a lack of understanding of grammar rules, elements of a paper, and the use of a grammar checker might lead to miscommunication. While you can’t refute the claim that practice makes perfect, you must become familiar with the writing strategies highlighted in this article to become a pro at conveying information on paper.
Top 5 effective writing strategies for students in college
1. Always maintain consistent tenses
One of the effective pre-writing process stages that you are most likely to overlook concerns establishing the time perspective for your work. For instance, if you’re doing an essay on recommendations such as “Strategies That Transformational Leaders Can Use to Inspire Motivation,” it will be best to use future tense rather than present or past.
On history papers, especially on the account of events leading to a specific outcome, you should always use past tense. Even though evidence-based strategies recommend maintaining a consistent tense from the opening sentence to a final statement on the conclusion, you might deviate from this rule, for example, when reporting on your paper. Take a look at the following example to understand how you can mix tenses.
Yesterday, my sister in the UK video called me and reminded me to wear warm clothes. Thanks to her advice, I can go home late.
The two sentences are in different time perspectives, but you can find them in a single paragraph because of the aspect of reporting in the first statement.
2. Always adhere to correct sentence composition
Regardless of whether you’re writing a simple or compound sentence, you must always incorporate a subject and a verb. Usually, a subject can either be a noun or a pronoun. In case you look for online writing strategies for students on this issue, you’ll get information indicating that omitting either a subject or verb leads to a grammatical issue known as a fragmented sentence. The following examples explain the issue of adhering to correct sentence composition:
- Students wrote examples of writing strategies – it has both subject (student) and verb (wrote).
- Wrote examples of writing strategies – it lacks the subject but has the verb (wrote) only.
- Students with examples of writing strategies – it has the subject (students) only.
In the three statements, only the first example is correct because of the subject and verb.
3. Always avoid cases of subject-verb disagreements
One of the organizational strategies for crafting flawless PowerPoint presentations and reports concerns using Grammarly to eliminate subject-verb disagreement. Although this strategy can save time, it might be unhelpful for literature students, especially those who aspire to be English teachers. In particular, frequent avoidance of this issue in writing prior to using Grammarly will place them in a better position to devise instructional materials for learning literary devices.
Examples of the sentences with and without subject-verb disagreement:
- A student often reads books on literacy strategies – without subject-verb disagreement.
- A student often read books on literacy strategies – with subject-verb disagreement.
4. Always minimize wordiness
When you’re in college, you will come across assignments with a few or many pages. For example, you might find yourself working on a discussion post or reply of 100 words, even 50 words. In such scenarios, it won’t be tiresome. However, with dissertations and capstone projects, you’ll find yourself doing 10-plus pages.
Regardless of the number of words, you should always strive to use a single word instead of a phrase.
For examples:
- Use “investigate” instead of “conduct an investigation”
- Use “understand” instead of “is aware of the fact that”
- Use “suggest” instead of “make a suggestion”
- Use “discover” instead of “make a discovery”
You can use Grammarly to reduce wordiness in your papers. However, the use of this AI tool to achieve this perfection might violate some grammar rules. Take a look at the following two examples:
- I referred this patient on the basis of her minimal response to the second-line treatment of fungal infection.
- I referred this patient based on her minimal response to the second-line treatment of fungal infection.
When you run these two sentences in Grammarly, you’ll get a suggestion of “on the basis of” being wordiness. In most cases, you might accept the changes of reverting it to “based on.” However, the first sentence is grammatically correct as “on the basis of” modify a verb as opposed to “based on” that modify a “pronoun.” You might feel that these guidelines are petty, but they really count on perfection. What does this mean? Unless you make professional essay writers from https://www.customwritings.com your academic partner, you might never become a pro with only free available writing strategies examples on the Internet.
5. Always avoid repetition
Similar to a menu, you can’t keep repeating the same word in a single sentence or statements following each other. A simple writing strategy of avoiding repetition concerns using synonyms or pronouns. For example, you can alternate a firm with a company in successive sentences. What about the use of pronouns?
When you’ve used a company, you can use “it” in the second sentence. What about a person or individual? The problem always arises when you don’t know the gender. In most cases, some students might write as he or she. However, APA 7 recommends using the pronoun “their” or “they” to refer to a person, especially when you’re unsure of the gender.
Other five examples of writing strategies
1. Create an outline
When you have a problem with meeting the word count for an assignment with fewer or many pages, you should consider creating an outline allocating a specific number of words to headings.
2. Stick to a single idea per paragraph
Whether you’re writing a 2- or 10-page essay, you should always ensure that your paragraph has a single idea. You can use one of the rhetorical strategies, specifically linking facts into a sequence, to achieve this goal.
3. Provide personal evaluation of sources
In modern writing, many professors stress the importance of evaluating the sources to uncover unique information. Usually, this writing strategy distinguishes between AI and human-written papers.
4. Read a lot
Stephen King’s quote, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot,” emphasizes the need for you to develop a culture of reading to be a better writer.
5. Interact with other great writers
As the saying goes, “birds of a feather flock together,” you need to surround yourself with persons of the same interests as you. You can interact with other renowned writers on social media.
Generally speaking, although this article doesn’t provide a comprehensive list of writing tactic examples, it’s a good starting point when you want your work to reflect some aspects of cognate strategies. Hopefully, you will do better writing when you internalize the highlighted essential grammar rule, research approach, and writing process stages.
