Developing Your Writing Skills

There are many ways to develop your writing skills. The most common way that your skill will develop is through written assignments assigned at university. These will often accompany every module, unit or even lecture - depending on your professor of course. These assignments will also help improve your spelling and vocabulary, but there is more to it than just writing the assignments, because you want to write assignments that will earn you the best mark (A+).


Learn to Enjoy Writing
If you can find a way to make the writing process something enjoyable, that you look forward to doing, then it is that much easier to complete the assignment. To help make writing enjoyable, you can do a few things:

1. Do not procrastinate. Start working on assignments early so that you are not rushing to meet deadlines.
2. Writing is a creative process. You will write multiple drafts (two or three at least) that will be successive better until you are satisfied with the final product.
3. Understand the requirements of style and convention. Take pride in producing a piece of written work, an essay that meets your definition of excellent.

Task Definition
Before you start writing or even planning, take a few minutes to read the essay question. The essay title will always include the question that you have to answer. So spend a little time to understand exactly what exactly the question is, so you can put the right answer(s) in your essay.

Planning There is a lot of truth to the adage, “Failing to plan, is planning to fail.” Even if you have already understood the assignment, use the word limit and the guidelines that came with the assignment to determine how much reading and research you need to. Once you have done the required reading, you can start to plan your essay. Take the time to work out how long each step, or paragraph should take you and then add a little extra time - because it always takes a little long than you planned.

The Essay Plan It will take time to plan, draft and redraft the essay in question. Needless to say, the more changes and improvements you make, the longer it will take to write the final draft of the essay. Needless to say, most of us will plan, draft and write our essay on a computer, allowing you to make improvements and changes repeatedly until you have completed the final draft, ready for submission.

Over the course of many essays…
Given time and enough essays, you will develop your own strategies, short cuts and other tricks that will streamline the writing process for you, until you are capable of hammering out top quality essays in what will see like record time.