Effective Assignment Writing Strategies for Academic Success

28 Dec Effective Assignment Writing Strategies for Academic Success

Writing assignments is something that you’d have to do on a pretty frequent basis as a student. Every week, there may be a few of them that you’d have to hand in and then get graded according to their quality.

If you are looking to succeed as a student, you need to ensure that you write your assignment properly and follow the right high-quality best practices.

In this post, we’re going to look at some effective assignment writing strategies and tips that you can follow to succeed in your academic career. It’s a very big promise, but nevertheless, the tips we’re going to mention are very useful and effective.

1.     Always clear up the assignment details before starting

One of the main mistakes that students can make while writing assignments is not paying enough attention to the provided details. As a result, the resultant write-up is not according to the provided guidelines—which causes it to get rejected or be given a low grade.

This is something that you should avoid doing at all costs. You should carefully read the provided guidelines and clear up any confusion or ambiguity that you may have regarding them with your teacher or supervisor.

2.     Perform your research well before time

This is another good strategy or tip that you should follow to write good assignments.

Performing research and writing the assignment out at the same time is not a very good idea. When you do your research, the words and style of the sources get ingrained in your mind for some time. Then, when you start writing, that exact style and the same words can start showing up in your own content.

This can cause the assignment to look somewhat plagiarized and copied.

A good way to approach this is to perform your research and garner all the relevant information sometime before you start writing. That way, you can keep the information and ideas from your research without the risk of plagiarizing anything. When you gather the information, you should focus on collecting the core idea and concept rather than the same style and words.

3.     Create a plan and an outline for your assignment before starting

Creating an outline for your academic write-up before you start writing it is also an important and helpful step that you should follow. You can spend a bit of time beforehand in making the outline, but it can help you save a lot of it later on.

The benefits of creating an outline for your work prior to starting are:

• You can start and keep writing without giving a lot of thought to what to include and what to exclude.
• You don’t get off-track when writing. In other words, you don’t start off writing about irrelevant stuff—something which can occur quite frequently if you’re writing off the top of your head.
• You can specify and demarcate the exact number of words to include in each part of the content to comply with the provided guidelines.

4.     Maintain readability in your content when writing

Once all the preparation is done, the next thing that you have to do is start writing the assignment. When writing the assignment, there are a few different things to keep in mind. One of the most important ones is readability.

Readability determines the ease (or otherwise) with which the reader can peruse and understand your assignment. It is affected by things like:

• The word choice in the assignment
• The length of the sentences and passages
• The existence or lack thereof of assistive visuals and illustrations

When you’re writing, you should ensure that you keep all of these factors in mind. Your word choice should be easy and normal, save for the instances where sophisticated terms are the only way to get the meaning across. The sentences should be around 20 words long on average, and the passages should be four lines, with the occasional longer or shorter ones where needed.

5.     Ensure grammatical perfection in the assignment

If your assignment is grammatically perfect and does not contain frequent errors, it can make a positive impression on your reader/teacher. The contrary is true for an assignment that is riddled with grammar and spelling mistakes.

The main thing that you should do to make sure that this problem doesn’t exist in the content is to keep an eye out when writing the first draft. Simply with a little deliberation and care when writing the sentences, you can avoid making a lot of mistakes and errors.

But of course, this is not enough in most cases. Once you are done writing, you also have to check and proofread the content, as well as use an online grammar checker on them.

As far as checking and proofreading goes, it is fairly simple and easy to do. You just have to give the write-ups a couple of reads, spacing each session out with a duration of some minutes or hours according to the time available.

A good tip regarding proofreading is to look for certain errors and mistakes every time you read the content. For example, you can look for spelling errors the first time you read the assignment. Then, you could look for grammar mistakes the next time around.

Moving on, when it comes to using a grammar-checking tool, there is a bigger handful of factors that you should keep in mind. We are listing them hereunder:

• To get the most out of a grammar-checking tool, you should take care to pick one that works well and has a hefty user base
• When using the tool itself, you should pay attention to each of the errors that it points out. There are times when tools like this point out nonexistent errors as errors, so you have to be sure not to accept those suggestions.
• You should take care to preserve the formatting of your text when using a grammar checker. There are some tools that check the content and then provide an output file with just the plain text without any of the formatting that it originally contains. If you are using a tool that does not preserve formatting, you can simply take your content piece by piece, correct it using the tool, and then paste it back into the file.

Conclusion

These are some tips and strategies that you can follow to make your assignments better and increase your chances of getting a good grade on them. You should essentially ensure that your assignment is based on proper research, is unique, and does not contain errors of any kind…among other things.

We hope you had fun reading this article and that it will be helpful for you the next time you need to create a write-up for an assignment.