Essays are an integral part of everyone’s academic journey. We start writing essays in high school, and that continues into college, no matter what you decide to major in. The only difference is, the essays become a lot harder, and professors tend to grade them a lot harshly. Now, that wouldn’t be the problem if most essays weren’t critical for your final grade, but you have to learn how to write them better since they are.
Now, that might be a particular issue for international students whose native language isn’t English. Granted, many international students have a much better vocabulary than most native-English speakers, but that’s only because they actually had to learn the words when they were studying English in school.
Be that as it may, just because you have the vocabulary does not mean you know how to write an essay. You could have a ton of bricks and you still wouldn’t be able to build a house without the rest of the materials, right? Well, luckily, there is more than one way to improve your essay writing skills. Here are a few tips!
1. Write A Draft In Your Native Language
The best way to get started is to write a draft or a template in your native language and work from that. This should allow you to quickly come up with great ideas and build a solid base for your essay. A base is fundamental when it comes to writing essays. It allows you to understand the subject in a much better way, so you can, later on, build upon it.
Now, we would advise you to write the draft in your native language because that way, it’ll be easier for you to understand the basic concepts of the subject you’re supposed to write on. Once you do that, it will be much easier to expand your work and write it in a foreign language.
2. Read More, In English
The second best way to learn how to write is to read. Reading is not only fun, but it’s beneficial, as well. It will enrich your vocabulary and it will help you learn how to write great sentences as a native speaker would.
Now, one question that comes to everyone’s mind is – what should I read? In a word – everything. It doesn’t matter whether you’re going to pick up a novel, poem or a scientific journal – all of it will help. Naturally, you could just grab somebody else’s essay and read those and that will also help, but don’t think that just because you need to write an essay, you should read an essay. It’ll certainly help, but you can read whatever you want.
3. Practice Writing Essays
That was our second-best way for you to learn how to write an essay and here’s the best – write an essay. Practice writing essays whenever you can and you’ll being to notice the progress after only a few pages. Over time, you’re going to build skill, knowledge, speed and what’s even better – you’ll learn some new stuff along the way.
Now, we get that writing an essays takes much time, but take it easy. This is not an assignment and there’s no deadline – it’s just you and a blank sheet of paper. Start slowly. Write only a paragraph or two a day.
Before you know it, you’ll be writing two pages per day for fun and who knows, maybe one day, you’ll get to do what https://www.theunitutor.com/ does.
4. Start Early
The worst thing you can do when it comes to writing essays is to postpone it until you can’t anymore. That’s just going to create a lot of pressure and you’re going to write a lousy piece. Remember, an essay is not a short story that you can just make up in a matter of minutes when the inspiration hits you. Now, we’re not saying you can write an excellent short story in a matter of minutes. We’re just saying you can’t really rely on inspiration to carry you towards the finish line when it comes to essays.
Essays take time and preparation. Also, the language you’ll be using is not the same language you use every single day. There are specific rules you have to follow and when you try to cram all of that in a matter of hours or, in the best-case scenario, a day, you can’t expect to write a piece – it’s just impossible.
5. Use Tools At Your Disposal
For an international student, a language barrier could pose an issue. That is why you should use every tool at your disposal to make your essay shine. Unless you’re really good at writing, you’re going to miss an article or a comma, or you’re going to write a sentence that’s just too complex and so on. All of those minor mistakes can be easily fixed with some tools you can find online.
There are many sites that you can use to polish your essays. Sites like Grammarly are an excellent tool for everyone that struggles with writing in English. Simply upload your file to the website and check out the suggestions the site makes. If you want, you can even get a Pro version to get even more out of it, but a freemium should be more than enough in most cases.
6. Proofread
Finally, no matter how many essays have you written or how many times you used various tools to polish your piece – nothing beats proofreading. Take your time and read your essay sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph and pay attention to every single detail. You’d be amazed at how many things you’ll manage to fix just by proofreading your work.
Now, if you don’t have the necessary skills, patience or knowledge to proofread your work, you can always find someone else to do it for you – either for free or for a few bucks. Either way – don’t forget to do it!
Conclusion:
There you have it. Those were our useful tips on how to write better essays if you’re an international student. Sure, there are a dozen of other tips we could’ve given you, but we wanted to stick to the basics and keep things simple for you. Hopefully, you’ve found this helpful and are well on your way to writing a perfect essay.
