What to Avoid When Writing an Essay

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A teacher or professor has given a writing assignment, and you’ve taken the wise step of looking up how to pen a great essay. There are lots of how-to guides and what-to-do articles full of helpful pointers out there to get you started.

But it’s important to keep in mind what you should avoid doing, too! An otherwise well-crafted essay can still fall flat if you stumble over a common pitfall. So what are some things you should avoid?

Don’t Plagiarize

This should be a pretty obvious one, but just in case it needs to be said—don’t cheat, and don’t plagiarize someone else’s work. It’s not honest, it’s unfair to the person whose work you’re stealing, and it’ll get you a big fat F on your essay.

If you’re worried that you may have accidentally plagiarized someone’s work (maybe you have such a clear memory that it’s difficult to put a concept into your own words, or maybe you’re concerned you might be struck by a disastrous coincidence), there are plagiarism-checkers available online.

Remember to cite your sources, and to attribute direct quotes correctly.

Don’t Pick a Vague Topic

If you’ve been assigned an essay that allows you to choose your own topic, don’t go vague. That can lead to a rambling, unfocused essay that neither educates nor advances any meaningful argument.

Pick a specific topic, and if possible pick one that you care about or are interested in. Plan your work around something concrete, and your essay will be much stronger.

Don’t Skip the Research

It may be tempting to save time and try to write your essay without making the effort to really research your subject. Perhaps you’ve covered it in class and you think you’ve got a solid grasp of the topic. But your teacher or professor isn’t looking for you to recap their own lessons to them. Maybe it seems self-explanatory to you. But there are almost certainly angles you haven’t realized or considered.

And don’t try to BS your way through an unresearched essay. Your professor will be able to tell who has put in effort and who hasn’t.

Not only will doing your research make your essay shine all the brighter, it may lead you to uncover facts or ideas that you hadn’t expected. And that’s not only what education is all about, it can also be really fun.

Don’t Just Regurgitate

You’ve done your research, and that’s great! Before you start writing your essay, though, take some time to sit with that research and discover what your own thoughts on the subject are.

Your essay needs to be more than a synopsis of your discoveries. This is a very common mistake, especially among students writing some of their first essays. Don’t merely summarize the work of others. Let it lead you to creating work of your own on the subject, supported by the work that’s come before.

Coming to your own conclusions and supporting those conclusions with all your research will enrich your essay. Plus, that’s often the crux of a writing assignment, and to skip this step in the process is to run the risk of missing the entire point of the work and losing points in your grade.

Don’t Lose Focus

This applies on a big scale, and it also applies on a smaller scale.

For the big picture, make sure you don’t lose track of the topic of your essay, don’t wander off on tangents. Make sure every paragraph in your essay (and every sentence in your paragraphs) are on-topic and to the point.

And on the smaller scale, keep remember to be concise! Long, meandering sentences and huge, blocky paragraphs are likely to lead you to lose that focus. On top of that, they also are more difficult to read and pay attention to. You want your essay to keep your reader (in this case your instructor) engaged and interested all the way through. Meandering, formless writing will spoil that every time.

Don’t Turn in a First Draft

First drafts are never ready to be graded! Your first draft will likely have grammatical errors in it, as well as typos. If you’re worried that you may not have caught all of those errors, you can find a grammar checking website online, such as https://prowritingaid.com/essay-checker.

For checking things like clarity, structure, and flow, it helps to have a friend you can swap papers with, each reading the other’s to help make sure it works. If your friends aren’t able to help in this regard, there are services online for that as well.

Well…Don’t Just Sit There!

A writing assignment doesn’t have to be stressful, and it doesn’t have to be a struggle. If you keep these common mistakes in mind and make sure to avoid them, you will give yourself a great head start on writing an essay that will earn you a good grade. So go on, don’t procrastinate, get writing now!