The thought of graduating from high school and getting admission to a college may excite you. Because what's more fun than meeting new people and enjoying Greek life at college, right? Yet, little do you know that these four years are not less than the most stressful time of your adulthood. You’d be transitioning from being carefree to a responsible adult, there are several challenges you have to face and fears to overcome. One of them is the difference in writing practices of high school and college.
Now, you must be wondering how hard it can be and that writing has always stayed the same. However, you will not understand this now, but once you start penning down, you'll see the differences. Moreover, you may have observed that most of the students run away from writing assignments and papers. Although they tend to avoid each writing activity, it plays a great role in college success.
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If you are not ready to compose tons of assignments, reports, and proposals, get started now. This guide will help you understand the basics and prepare you for the writing challenges that are yet to come.
1. Make Books Your Best Friend
The simplest way to improve your writing skills is to read. Most of the students are not avid readers and consider it boring when they spend 6 hours learning different courses at school. What they don't understand is that studying with other students is dissimilar to studying alone. It lets you focus on the structure, word choices, and formatting along with other important writing variables. You must make reading your habit as it works subconsciously. The genre of the material does not matter as long as you study something each day. However, always keep a check of how the author has approached the audience.
2. Study the Writing Process
Just like unprepared students get drowned easily in the challenges, anxieties and stresses of the college life, poor writers don't stick around for too long either. The writing standards in college is higher than in colleges and high schools. If you think you can survive with your school writing skills, you are in the wrong. This is why, to ensure that you are fully prepared to produce premium quality content, follow the below stated steps.
• Plan and Prewrite
Writing is a task that you cannot do in a disturbing environment. For this reason, you will have to sit peacefully, brainstorm ideas and design a structure in your mind. Once you think you have done enough research, you can start scribbling to remember the key points.
• Draft
After planning and generating ideas, start writing your first draft of the topic. The first try doesn't need to be perfect. It is usual to repeat this step several times until the content meets your requirements and standards. In the end, pat yourself on the back for not losing motivation and composing a polished piece.
• Re-read and Edit
Here comes the most daunting part that every student dreads, proofreading and editing or revising the written content. It is not necessary to edit it on the same day when you have finished writing. You can plan your revisions making sure they are set before the deadline. This phase will help you identify the minor as well as major mistakes and further polish your documents to perfection. Your teachers, editors or advisors can also help you in this.
3. Think Strategically and Critically
While high school writing is all about presenting your opinions, ideas and takes on everyday matters, college writing is a lot different. Professors require up to the standard papers composed after thorough research including correct analysis and supporting arguments. In short, they want to know the primary purpose behind the piece with strong reasons. You can only achieve this by putting the critical thinking cap on and conduct in-depth research and consideration. In case you need guidance, you can get help from your instructors to set you on the right track.
4. Don't Always Follow a Template Structure
You must have been taught about the five paragraphs technique in your high school. The introduction with three supporting body sections and a conclusion in the end, right? However, college writing demands creativity and this can only happen when you know the basics of design and composition of the content. So, it can either be less or more than five paras. To master this, you need to look up at the topic in a different light. In short, ignore the traditional practices and work according to your requirements.
5. Polish Your Writing Skills
Your content has little to no worth if it has grammatical errors, wrong vocabulary, colloquialism or wordiness. The originality of the work does matter as well. To ensure that your work is of top-notch quality, you must take lessons about sentence structuring, formatting, punctuation, conjunction and other factors that make a paper worthwhile. On the other hand, you can also subscribe to an online English magazines, watch Hollywood movies, or simply read a books to boost your writing skills. Doing this would make you position yourself on top and improving; getting praises from the professor.
We know the transition from the high school to college is tempting but the barriers that would come in between would make it a bit dreadful. Half of the students’ life is spent trying to excel in writing assignments to get higher grades. These five tricks can help you prepare yourself for content writing in college.