Top 7 Most Common Mistakes In Essay Writing

You can face many challenges as a college student, and essay writing makes up most of them. Apart from the sheer number of essays to write, the likelihood of making mistakes in these essays is another challenge. These essay writing mistakes are the main reason essays get rejected, and the more reason students seek essay help from seasoned professionals rather than write it themselves.

To avoid being in the position where your essay gets rejected, or you don’t get high grades, you should learn about the common mistakes people make in essay writing to avoid them.

Overloaded sentences

When you write your essay, you must express your thoughts briefly. Nobody is interested in reading long sentences with scholarly definitions and complex phrases. You can make your essay appear more substantial by looking for a unique idea and describing it using simple and understandable words. This works best for international students or if English is not your native language. It makes it easier to avoid overwhelming passages, and your text becomes easily understandable without difficult words to distract readers from the core message.

Repetition

Repetition is a very common mistake students make when writing essays. Two types of repetitions are common in student essays. The first repetition is about the idea or argument in the essays and the second type of repetition is in the use of words.

You should typically discuss a point and move on to the next one in an essay, but repeating an idea indicates your lack of adequate knowledge or information about the topic. Hence, you have to come up with more ideas through research.

To combat repeated words, you can use an online dictionary or thesaurus to find synonyms conveying your message clearly to avoid repeating the same words or phrases.

Lack of structure

Every essay follows a standard structure consisting of the introductory paragraph, body paragraphs, and the concluding paragraph. These are different parts of an essay, and each one has its outline. So before you start writing your essay, you must acquaint yourself with them. For instance, your introduction should have a hook, thesis statement and prompt. You can also finalize your introduction using an outline sentence that allows you to describe your research method shortly and the number of parts that reveal your topic.

Also, make sure that your body paragraphs start with topic sentences and provide evidence with linking statements for each of the body paragraphs. In the concluding paragraph, ensure that the reader can restate your thesis, repeat your topic frame, and summarize your argument.

Spelling errors

There are several online services and grammar checkers that you can use to edit your papers, so spelling errors shouldn’t be an issue anymore. But students still get to submit essays full of these errors and get punished for it. While most of these tools are designed for grammar, they also work for spelling. However, proofreading it yourself and checking for these mistakes is the best thing to do. It may not be enough to rely solely on the software to correct these mistakes.

Accidental plagiarism

Plagiarism remains one of the biggest issues in academia today and is even seen as a criminal offense. So, it’s something you have to be extremely careful about. You shouldn’t get caught reusing other people’s content, but people tend to make this mistake, even accidentally.

To ensure your essay is unique, you must do your research properly and check your citations. Be sure to add quotes based on the formatting style in your essay. Ensure not to underestimate your additional resources as well.

For instance, you may use interviews from a video blogger and other articles related to your essay topics, archives, documents and other resources instead of the recommended literature that is often overused. Also, you should always check your texts with plagiarism checker tools before submitting them to your teacher. Some examples of plagiarism checkers that you can use are Plagramme, PlagTracker, PlagScan and Unicheck.

Lack of time

Students don’t often have enough time to deal with all the essays on their hands. So, you’re often running out of time and having a lot to do close to their deadline. Hence, they tend to do their essay in a rush, making you error-prone. Consequently, you should try to start your essay in advance as this is vital to getting good results. This might mean you have to cut off other activities to create more time, but it’s necessary to plan your writing processes ahead of time in straightforward steps.

Make sure to prepare, be efficient in your research, and create an essay structure first. Write the first draft and revise it continuously till it’s good enough.

Conclusion

Mistakes are common in essay writing, but they’re not impossible to avoid. Knowing the most common mistakes people make will help you avoid them.