Writing an essay in university will be a lot different than writing a simple high school paper. The essays will be longer. They will require intense research and careful formatting. They will undergo more stringent corrections, from TAs and professors alike.
If you want to write impressive essays when you’re in university, you should follow these steps now:
Take the Right High School Courses
ENG4U (university-level grade 12 English) is one of the best courses to prepare you for academic essay writing. While you can take ENG4C (college-level grade 12 English) to get your mandatory English course credit for your high school diploma, it won’t prepare you for academic essay writing in university.
If you’ve already made the mistake of signing up for an ENG4C course, you can try to transfer to the ENG4U course midway through the year. If this option is unavailable to you, you can enroll in the university-level course online. This accredited online school gives students between 4 weeks to 12 months to complete their course. Upon passing the course, students will receive an official credit.
The online school also offers a university writing prep course for students looking to hone their essay-writing skills. This non-credit course is completely free.
Invest in Editing Tools
Proper editing can make your essays clean and concise. Some editing tools available online are Grammarly, Ginger and Grammar Checker. Get acquainted with them now so that your essays are no longer full of grammatical errors, typos and other writing issues.
Learn about Plagiarism
Plagiarism is already a serious accusation in high school. You don’t want to commit this act of academic theft in university. It could result in severe consequences, like course failure, academic probation or expulsion. So, now is a good time to identify what plagiarism is and what you can do to avoid it.
Plagiarism is a term that means stealing someone else’s work and taking ownership of it. So, if you copied a portion of an academic essay and inserted it into your own essay without crediting the original author, that would be construed as plagiarism.
How can you avoid plagiarizing? These are some tips:
- Don’t try to pass off someone’s work as your own ideas. Instead, reference those works to support your original essay ideas.
- If you want to insert someone’s writing directly into your essay, do it through quotations.
- Always cite the works that you quote, paraphrase or reference throughout your essays.
- Use a plagiarism checker to catch any undetected forms of plagiarism before handing in an essay.
Learn Where to Find Sources
Where can you find essay sources? The library is a good place to start. The public library system will have various collections of printed sources that you can access, as long as you have a library card. It will also have digital archives like the Academic OneFile database that you can browse from anywhere. Once you’re in university, you’ll have unlimited access to your school libraries’ print and digital archives.
Never dismiss the capabilities of a simple Google search. You might be able to find some interesting sources there! Learn Google search tips to increase your chances of getting strong search results every time.
Use Citation Tools
You’re going to have to cite all of your sources in your essays. You’ll have to do it in footnotes, quotes and citation pages. If you’re not sure how to format your citations properly, you should use citation tools like BibMe, Citation Machine, Citefast, Cite This For Me or Citationsy.
Follow these tips and you’ll be sure to impress your professors with your essays!
