Academic Writing scares a lot of students and people even if they have good ideas to share. Others are told that they just have to write better without any help. Academic writing is not rocket science. It requires a set of skills and you can learn them easily to make your writing clean. Here are a few things that will help you aim for writing better papers and essays in the future.

Panic and Procrastinate If you are in a state of panic or procrastinate from fear then there is no point to continue writing. Sit back, take a break. It doesn’t have to be a long break; a short break would also suffice. Another 30 minutes of panic won’t help you get a better grade.  Make coffee, take a walk and deep breaths is far better option in such a situation.

Spine of the Essay Make a proper plan to write your essay. It should be a route through the topic. Thus, it is the spine of your essay. Make sure you do this step early, as it will help you decide what papers and books you must read and what you can ignore. A safe and simple spine is to focus on one thing at a time. It can be any of the main topics of your essay. Take that one idea or theory at a time and write everything that needs to be shared. The best option will be to take out topics, structure your arguments, and discuss all the material heading by heading. A spine of topics and ideas helps more than just describing the particular idea. It also highlights a lot of other important points as well. This can also help you explore through your content and analyze all the topics and measure their differences.

First Draft

Write the first draft of your essay for yourself to work out what you think is right. Make a second draft for the reader who has no clue what you want to share. Here are a few tips to make this process easy:

• Make a list of everyday tasks for writing your essay. Don’t go to other section or topics in between. If you are worried about missing an important point, make a note of it.
• Put the first draft away for a few days, change the font or swap it with a friend to get away from it.
• Write the second draft on the sense of distancing yourself from the first draft. Write it in such a way that a person who doesn’t know about this essay understands. The reader must stay with you throughout the spine.
• Finish it by going through slips and typos. Check all the references correctly and tidy up all the loose ends.

Read Aloud

Read your essay out loud to see if your brain understands the sense of your writing and ideas. Shape up its rhythm and sentences in a flow. You mind or tongue will trip if any sentence does not make sense. Reading aloud is your friends because you can catch typos, punctuation and gaps.
Writing your Conclusion

The conclusion is the general idea or the big idea of the entire essay. Write it in such a way that it emerges through different stages, but make sure that all the questions are answered. Don’t add a new idea in your conclusion even if you really want to do it. If you think it is absolutely necessary to add that idea, go to the body and fit it there.

Forming sentences

• Keep all the main phrases towards the beginning of each sentence. Don’t make the reader wait too long to figure out who did what.
• Don’t construct your sentences in passive voice even when you leave out “I”.
• Don’t use hidden metaphors. In some sentences, metaphors are hidden and they don’t make sense at all. They may be figurative words which are not metaphors completely but such words confuse the reader. Thus, it is better to avoid using hidden metaphors.